Night. The setting for nearly the entire book. With the title and the subject, that certainly makes sense.
Risika. Formerly Rachel Weatere. The main character. A 300-year-old vampiress of Silver’s line who stays away from others of her kind as much as possible. She lives in an old house in Concord that she swindled from an old couple. She visits a tiger at the zoo regularly and broods over the death of her twin brother, Alexander, in 1701. Risika is morose, vicious, and venegeful. A nasty combination.
Aubrey. Risika’s nemesis. He’s violent, beautiful, and charasmatic. He killed Alexander Weatere and put a scar across Risika’s shoulder with his infamous knife, forged of vampire hunter silver. Risika has sworn her revenge, but is under the impression that Aubrey is far stronger than her. (“We must be speaking of different Aubreys, because the last time I fought the Aubrey I know I lost.”)
Within the first three chapters, Risika has trespassed on Aubrey’s territory and set the stage for a minor war between the two vampires. The chapters alternate between the present and the past, showing Risika’s conflict now and her past. It all winds together until Risika and Aubrey face down in the vampiric bar Los Noches (“…and the nightclub is as strange as an ice-skating rink in hell.”) like you knew they would the moment Aubrey was brought into the action.
There’s the synopsis. Now for my opinion.
“In the Forests of the Night” is a fluff book. That’s doesn’t mean I don’t like it, because I’m a big fan of Atwater-Rhodes. Her later books (Demon In My View, Shattered Mirror, and Midnight Predator) are like horror harlequins. She obviously read some Anne Rice when younger, possibly Poppy Z. Brite, and maybe even some of Somtow’s Riverrun Trilogy. I get the feel of all of them, to minor extents, in “IFN”. Of course, that could be because it’s a vampire novel. (Although it’s the scene in Ambrosia with the dying vampire that makes me think of Somtow for some reason)
I bought “In the Forests of the Night” for William Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger” which is in the beginning and referenced by Aubrey at a later point. The book itself is easy-to-read. The plot is fairly simplistic, and the twist at the end is very predictable. Miss Atwater-Rhodes wrote this book at age thirteen and it’s obvious. All the dramatic parts are over-the-top and border on being sappy. It has a few good scenes and good lines (one of which made it into my plethoria of away messages). The bit characters of Jager and Fala (who reappears in “Demon In My View” for some nice stints) are a lot of fun. It’s a great series to write fan fiction for, but Atwater-Rhodes isn’t exactly fine literature.
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