J.F. Lewis – Staked

The first book in the Void City series, published March 11, 2008.
Genre: urban fantasy
Cover: strong



Unrepentant. Unimpressed. And totally undead.
Being undead isn’t easy. All Eric wants to do is to run his strip club, drink a little blood, and be left alone. Instead, he’s got business troubles (his best friend is souring on their co-ownership of the demon Heart) and relationship troubles (his girlfriend is pressuring him to turn her so she can join him in undeath). And then there’s the memory loss: he can’t recall who he ate for dinner yesterday, much less how he became a vampire in the first place. But when he kills a werewolf in self-defense, things really get out of hand. Now he’s got a pack of born-again lycanthropes out for holy retribution – and his head. It’s almost enough to put a Vlad off his appetite. Almost.


Eric wakes up from his rage in an alley in Void City, where he as apparently just killed another vampire. A bum has seen it all, and Eric tries to pay him off. But the bum is a werewolf, who has killed vampires before, and now he goes for Eric. With the sun almost risen, Eric should be weaker and an easy pray for the werewolf. But Eric is a Vlad, the strongest kind of vampires there is, and almost impossible to kill. Just like Dracula in the movies, he will always come back.
At first Eric doesn’t want to kill the werewolf, just teach him to leave him alone, but the werewolf doesn’t give up. And with the sun already shining, Eric needs to get to shelter, fast.

He finally remembers the phone number to his strip club, and calls his manager, Talbot, to send out one of the girls with the van to pick him up, as he has just wrecked his brand new Hummer. He didn’t like the car anyway, so Eric doesn’t care about it at all.

Back home, he senses that his girlfriend Tabitha really thinks she is in love with him, and softy that he is, he can no longer deny her the change. Of course, after that, he will have to dump her, as he doesn’t do dead girls. He prefers them alive and warm, not cold and dead. Of course Tabitha doesn’t believe him, she thinks it is true love. The people who have worked with him for years now, know that he screws it up most of the times, and the new vampires don’t always emerge right.

And before Eric can help Tabitha ease into the life of a vampire, his werewolf troubles begin. Apparently, he killed the son of the local alpha, and the alpha wants revenge. Meaning: killing Eric and if that doesn’t work, his two children. And so the war is on … And Eric has to find out what has happened for real, and who did the killing if he did not do it …


I wasn’t sure if I would finish this book at first, I had trouble with the main characters, and the writing style. I don’t read many books written by men anymore. But it did not take long for me to like the troubles of this so very unlikely hero, and the different chapters from the different points of view of the main characters. For a vampire, he was so very human or perhaps male, being uninterested in his memory loss and the feelings of his girlfriend.

There is a lot more gore and blood and sex and swearing than I am used to, but you just get caught up in his crazy life, getting angry at his supposedly best friend for betraying him.

I enjoyed the new take on vampires, so different from the classic rules, the difference in strength and powers. And I am intrigued by some of the secondary characters.

The writing style is engaging, even though it took me a while to get used to it. The language is blunt and direct. No long flowery descriptions of anything. J.F. Lewis has created a fascinating city where the paranormal live openly but still hidden by a powerful spell from the humans they use callously as food.

I will read the second book straight away.

8 stars.

© 2013 Reviews by Aurian