Robin McKinley
Sunshine (2003)
Author: Robin McKinley
Genre: Horror (Humor)
Plot Summary:
When Rae “Sunshine” Seddon is kidnapped by a vampire gang and imprisoned in an abandoned mansion with only a vampire captive for company, she is sure that she is about to die. However, Sunshine has inherited magic-handling ability from her sorcerer father, and she is able to free herself from her chains. She finds an unlikely ally in her fellow prisoner Constantine, who helps her escape from the mansion in exchange for his own freedom. After her ordeal, Sunshine wants nothing more than to return to her normal life and to her job as a baker in a coffeehouse, but she finds that nothing will ever be the same again: she can no longer avoid her magical heritage, and she has a strange, shameful affinity for vampires that only deepens when Constantine heals her poisoned wound and gives her the dubious gift of vampire night vision. She teams up with Constantine to defeat the vampire gang leader that held them both captive, while at the same time she reluctantly agrees to help the Special Other Forces (a sort of occult FBI) hunt and kill vampires.
Geographical Setting: New Arcadia (medium-size city, planet Earth)
Time Period: Alternate present or near future (later in the 21st century)
Appeal Characteristics:
Consistent, quirky, personality-filled first person voice; interesting heroine who is practical, independent, subversive, and stubborn; intriguing mix of humor and terror, very much in the vein of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; leisurely pace with sudden jolts of action/violence; the author creates a fascinating, fleshed-out, horrifying post-apocalyptic world where a war between vampires/demons/weres (lumped into the category of Others) and humans has decimated a large portion of the human population and left humans living in fear of the Others and especially of vampires; this otherworldly quality, as well as the detailed descriptions of magical talismans, charms, wards, rituals, and spells, should appeal to fans of fantasy as well as horror
Similar Authors: Kelley Armstrong, Mary Janice Davidson, Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris
Red Flags: some objectionable language; a couple of sexual situations that are described with very crude language; some gore/violence as the heroine kills vampires and engages in a blood ritual with Constantine
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