30 July 2021

Halfway to the Grave by Jeaniene Frost

 

A woman stabbing a knife into the coffin she is sitting on.

FLIRTING WITH THE GRAVE . . .

Half-vampire Catherine Crawfield is going after the undead with a vengeance, hoping that one of these deadbeats is her father—the one responsible for ruining her mother’s life. Then she’s captured by Bones, a vampire bounty hunter, and is forced into an unholy partnership.

In exchange for finding her father, Cat agrees to train with the sexy night stalker until her battle reflexes are as sharp as his fangs. She’s amazed she doesn’t end up as his dinner—are there actually good vampires? Pretty soon Bones will have her convinced that being half-dead doesn’t have to be all bad. But before she can enjoy her newfound status as kick-ass demon hunter, Cat and Bones are pursued by a group of killers. Now Cat will have to choose a side . . . and Bones is turning out to be as tempting as any man with a heartbeat.


Halfway to the Grave (Night Huntress book one) by Jeaniene Frost

Start date: July 11, 2021

End date: July 12, 2021

Rating: 2 ½ out of 5 stars

Content warning: sexual assault, offensive language 

I’m going to admit something tragic. I only chose to read this book because I was curious to see how the author would write the story past the premise. I knew full well I wasn’t going to like it, but I read it anyway.

The main character is Catherine “Cat” Crawfield, a 22-year-old who lives at home with her single mother and elderly grandparents in the backwards, little town of Licking Falls, Ohio. She has put off going to college initially to take care of her grandparents, but she spends most of her time killing vampires as retribution for the vampire who ruined her mother’s life. You see, Cat is a vampire hunter who’s also a half-vampire.

“How can someone be a half-vampire?” you, a reasonable reader, may ask. According to this story, by having a newly turned vampire as a father. Without going too deeply into the lore of this story, which frankly there isn’t much to begin with, it’s explained that for Cat’s father to still have semen in his body when he raped her mother, he had to have been a vampire for less than a week because vampires reportedly lose all bodily fluids during their change. If the semen in his body was a leftover from his humanity, then I don’t understand how that would make Cat a half-vampire instead of a full human.

In this book, vampires don’t have bodily fluids. They can only move around the blood that they ingest to their different body parts at will (hence why later on a vampire ejaculates blood). If I had the choice, I would choose not to bleed out of any part of my body, but I digress... It’s stated that to turn into a vampire, you must have your blood drained “to the very point of death” and then have it replenished by blood from the vampire who drained you. Logic would dictate then that whatever causes vampirism in this universe stems from something in their blood. If Cat’s father raped her mother and ejaculated human semen AND vampire blood inside of her, I would almost believe that she could be born half-vampire. Almost.

Doubts of Cat’s paranormal paternity aside, her chosen method of hunting vampires is odd. She dresses up in clubbing outfits and hangs out in bars and nightclubs, luring male vampires with the promise of sex, only to stake them through the heart with silver when she gets them alone. I’m not sure why Cat chooses to specifically prowl those establishments because it’s never explained if that’s where vampires hang out more often or that there are more vampire attacks in those locations. If I was hunting vampires, I’d try to find out where they slept and kill them while they were vulnerable versus getting them alone somewhere to attack them and risking my life.

Cat only hunts vampires to please her mother. When she turned 16, her mother told her she was a half vampire and convinced her she needed to kill every vampire as revenge for her father raping her mother (and because they’re allegedly demons). Realistically, Cat’s motivation is weak and unbelievable since it stems from her mother’s desire for vengeance instead of her own. We’re to believe that she sacrifices her health and well-being from that young age to hunt vampires simply because one raped her mother. Even then, Cat’s desire to see her father dead is second to her desire to kill vampires for existing. As for how she discovered how best to kill vampires, well, this speaks for itself:

“Are you telling me bloody caramel apples and books taught you how to kill vampires?” (Frost 18)

            It’s hard for me to believe she started hunting vampires with nothing more than some knowledge she gleaned from fiction. She says she got it right on the first try (because of course she’s an expert at killing them right off the bat) but that she has a scar on her thigh to prove that not all her excursions were successful. In the five years she’s been hunting vampires, Cat has only averaged three dead vampires a year. With those odds, she’d have to be extremely lucky not to have gotten herself more seriously maimed during the times she was unsuccessful.

Enter the one vampire she can’t kill: Bones. This is really what drew me to wanting to read this book. I liked the idea of a vampire hunter pairing up with a vampire bounty hunter who’s also a vampire. Talk about potential complex motivations, but in the end, it falls flat. We know Cat’s (tenuous) motivations for killing vampires, but we don’t know why Bones kills his kind. When Cat asks him, he tells her it’s not her business despite being an open book about everything else including his past life as a prostitute, beggar, and thief. It’s never brought up again. The author was likely going for mysterious but like everything else in this book, it missed the mark completely.

I wanted to root for Cat and Bones as a crime-fighting duo, but their relationship never made sense and quickly devolved into a romance. Bones kidnaps Cat after she is unsuccessful at killing him after picking him up in a bar. He believes she’s been sent by the vampire he’s been hunting so he ties her up in the cave he’s living in. Let me repeat that for those in the back: Bones, a wealthy vampire, lives in a cave in the remote wilderness of Ohio that somehow has electricity. Back to the main story, Cat eventually confesses why she’s been hunting vampires and instead of killing her, Bones offers her a job hunting the big, bad villain, Hennessey, an evil vampire who Bones believes is connected to a web of human sex trafficking. In exchange for her service, Bones will help her track down and kill her (un)deadbeat dad.

Bones puts Cat through a training camp of sorts to better equip her with fighting skills that lasts for about a month, and then he pays for her to have a full body makeover. Because Cat is still going to be hunting vampires by baiting herself, it’s implied it’s necessary for her to get a whole new wardrobe and salon transformation. Bones has presumably been around for much longer than Cat has been alive without another woman to use as bait, so you would think he would have devised a better way of finding vampires since he is a vampire bounty hunter. From a writing standpoint, this only seems like a way to increase sexual tension between the two characters that the author wanted to couple. There’s a cringeworthy scene where Bones talks dirty to Cat under the guise of desensitizing her to prepare her for the job of seducing vampires. The makeover, the dirty talk, having her remove her underwear (which is apparently an irresistible scent to vampires…who already have a heightened sense of smell) all come off as a way of priming Cat for Bones to seduce.

And then that’s what he does. Cat is afraid of Bones from the beginning because of what he is. She’s been raised to believe that vampires are demons, and she doesn’t shake this belief even after they’ve killed a few vampires together. Bones readies Cat for a new mark named Crispin, which unsurprisingly turns out to be Bones himself, and they end up going on a date. There’s not much to their seduction. Cat hates Bones but has some thinly veiled attraction to him. Bones supposedly falls in love with Cat at first sight—so back in the bar where she coyly asks, “Want to fuck?” (Frost 5). Without any gradual decrease to Cat’s fear of Bones, she succumbs to her lust for him. Like that, they’re a couple, even though they’ve only known each other for two months at this point. After one kiss on the dance floor of a vampire club, all her anxiety and horror fly out the window. To quote Shakespeare, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Their relationship is toxic. From the moment they begin dating, Cat approaches every woman she encounters as a potential rival for Bones’s affections and acts aggressively towards them. Bones isn’t much better, threatening to cut off the testicles of Cat’s new neighbor Timmie who makes the mistake of saying hi to Cat and breaking the hand of Cat’s ex-boyfriend Danny. (Super brief aside: Cat’s description of her last sexual encounter with Danny is 100% rape and I will die on that hill.) Their jealousy is explained away by the fact that vampires are territorial creatures. At one point, Cat subconsciously grabs Bones’s penis over his pants to “mark” her territory in front of another woman. Healthy relationships don’t permit that kind of jealousy. To convince Bones that she wants to be with him, she says this gem (and he’s so happy with her he makes her repeat herself afterwards):

“…I’m a moody, insecure, narrow-minded, jealous, borderline-homicidal bitch.” (Frost 270)

On top of that dysfunction, Cat does so much slut-shaming that I had to periodically put the book down and do something else for a while. I got fed up with her describing her new outfits as “slutty” or immediately writing off a woman as a “tramp” because of her outfit.

There were boots, earrings, push-up bras, skirts, and something he swore to me were dresses but only looked like pieces of dresses. I was wearing one of those now, a bright green and silver number cut about four inches above my knees and way too low in the front. That, combined with my new leather boots, curled hair, and makeup, made me feel like a twenty-dollar whore. (Frost 62)

Complying, I was now outfitted as Cat, the Vampire-Killing Slut. (Frost 63)

“You were a nun?” I asked in disbelief, actually peeping back up her dress to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood. (Frost 238)

Someone badly needs to tell Cat that showing off skin or the tightness of your apparel does not correlate to promiscuity, not that it’s ever okay to judge someone’s sexual history. If the point was to make Cat come across as misogynistic, obsessively jealous, and ignorant, then it succeeded. It isn’t hard at times to see where Cat could have gotten her undesirable traits from. Justina Crawfield, Cat’s mother, says to her when she finds out her daughter has a vampire boyfriend:

“Is that what you’ve become, Catherine, a whore for the undead?” (Frost 330)

Bones is an interesting character who was fumbled in application. He is devastatingly handsome: he has bleached blond hair, dark eyes, chiseled cheekbones, and “diamonds-and-cream” colored skin (whatever that’s supposed to mean). He’s the son of a teenaged English prostitute who becomes a prostitute himself (read: he’s great at sex). After he was caught stealing, he was sent to Australia where he was turned into a vampire by a fellow inmate. His name comes from him awaking from death in a graveyard surrounded by bones. (Vampires don’t seem to be great at giving themselves names as another vampire in the book goes by Spade and, as mentioned earlier, Hennessey.) He’s rude, aggressive, and speaks unlike how English people speak. To assuage my distaste for his dialogue, I imagined Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer whenever he spoke. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Halfway to the Grave started life as fan fiction with Cat being a stand-in character to live dreams of being with Spike.

As for the actual hunting down of the bad vampires, there’s very little of it until the end of the book when Cat, Bones, and Bones’s entourage bust up the sex trafficking ring. During this, Cat learns that the governor (“My God, I voted for him!) is the head of the entire thing and takes it upon herself to kill him (Frost 315). She’s successful because, again, of course she is a professional at something she’s only seriously trained at for two months. She’s separated from Bones at this point and gets scooped up by a secret government agency that wants to recruit her. She reluctantly agrees (she always reluctantly agrees to these kinds of offers apparently) to spare herself prison time for killing the governor, but it requires her to fake her death and live under a new identity, which means she would have to give up dating Bones. Bones “rescues” her from the agents, but then Cat and her mother (her grandparents are killed by vampires) duck out on him without a word and leave for their new lives killing vampires for the government.

The book ends with Cat reminiscing about a “promise” Bones made to her earlier that encapsulates their defective relationship:

If you run from me, I’ll chase you. And I’ll find you…. (Frost 358)


Works Cited

Frost, Jeaniene. Halfway to the Grave. Gollancz, 2010. 

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