22 August 2021

Destined for an Early Grave by Jeaniene Frost

 

A woman resting her stiletto heel on an above ground burial vault in a cemetery.

HER DEADLY DREAMS LEAVE HER IN GRAVE DANGER

Since half-vampire Cat Crawfield and her undead lover Bones met six years ago, they’ve fought against the rogue undead, battled a vengeful Master vampire, and pledged their devotion with a blood bond. Now it’s time for a vacation. But their hopes for a perfect Paris holiday are dashed when Cat awakes one night in terror. She’s having visions of a vampire named Gregor who’s more powerful than Bones and has ties to her past that even Cat herself didn’t know about.

Gregor believes Cat is his and he won’t stop until he has her. As the battle begins between the vamp who haunts her nightmares and the one who holds her heart, only Cat can break Gregor’s hold over her. She’ll need all the power she can summon in order to bring down the baddest bloodsucker she’s ever face . . . even if getting that power will result in an early grave.


Destined for an Early Grave (Night Huntress, book four) by Jeaniene Frost

Start date: August 7, 2021

End date: August 10, 2021

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Trigger warning: child grooming, sexual abuse, offensive language

I have reached a point in reading this series where I feel like my book reviews serve a legitimate purpose. These popular books star awful characters in a way that makes their thoughts and behaviors seem normalized. Flawed characters make for dynamic writing, but the work must acknowledge in some way that the characters are imperfect. If it doesn’t, readers might aspire to be like them. My review today is going to touch on topics in this book that some readers might have difficulty reading about.


            Destined for an Early Grave starts with our lead character Cat having nightmares of an unknown vampire chasing her. In these dreams, she’s running towards Bones, her husband, while the mysterious vampire tells her that Bones isn’t her husband. Ominous. After formally joining his line with Mencheres’s line in the last book, Bones has had the same human mind reading skills as his grandsire, so he can usually sense Cat’s dreams [“Normally your dreams are like background music to me” (Frost 2)]. Surprisingly, he isn’t privy to these nightmares, and Cat intentionally withholds from him about her dreams. If Cat and Bones simply talked, then much of the rest of the story wouldn’t have happened.

            Mencheres knows about Cat’s dreams. The vampire she’s running away from is known as Dreamsnatcher—yet another goofy vampire nickname—and his superpower is he can “snatch” humans if he touches them in their dreams. In the previous book, At Grave’s End, the author was clearly inspired by Freddy Krueger when she created Patra and her ability to kill via dreams. It’s no surprise then that Frost recycled this feature in this book but instead of dying, the person is teleported. Dreamsnatcher has a very specific reason why he would want Cat.

            This book has the same plotline of the "villain of the week" as the other books. Hennessy, the vampire at the head of the human trafficking ring that Cat and Bones destroyed in Halfway to the Grave, sought to kill them both. Ian, Bones’s sire, pursued Cat to add her to his exotic collection because she’s a half-vampire in One Foot in the Grave. Max, Cat’s (un)deadbeat daddy, repeatedly tried to kill Cat because she was his half-undead offspring; he was the Big Bad of both One Foot in the Grave and At Grave’s End until his timely demise by Bones’s hand in the latter. In Destined for an Early Grave, Dreamsnatcher wants Cat in part because she’s a half-vampire. Why it would be bad if he caught her isn’t explained until nearly the end of the book, however.  

            I have a theory that Frost wrote herself into a corner, so when she had the idea for this novel, she rewrote the backstory to accommodate it. According to this book, Dreamsnatcher and Cat met years before she met Bones, and she has no memory of it because Mencheres erased the memory. It’s been previously established that vampire mind powers don’t work on Cat as a unique facet of being a half-vampire. Cat brings this up (probably to dispel the problems the audience such as myself would have), and Mencheres explains it away by saying he’s the only one powerful enough to do it and it nearly took all his power when he did. Mencheres can’t undo the memory erasure because he hid the memory so deeply in Cat’s psyche that even he can’t reach it…

            Cat remembers her time with Dreamsnatcher (real name Gregor) when she drinks his blood about halfway through the book. I forewarn anyone sensitive who may be reading, what follows is a prime example of grooming. When Cat was a teenager, Dreamsnatcher learned about Cat’s existence as a half-vampire and tricked her away from her family by telling her a bad vampire (Bones) was after her. He told her that Bones was going to kill her family and wanted to turn her into a killer and “whore,” and only he could save her from this fate. He used his vampire mind control powers on Justina, Cat’s mother, so she would convince Cat to go with him. (There’s no mention of Cat’s grandparents who are still alive during this time.) Dreamsnatcher whisked Cat off to Paris where he kept her confined in his mansion (for her safety, of course), showering her with gifts and telling her how pretty she was. Cat developed a crush on him, a normal reaction in this type of twisted situation.

Not only is Gregor about a thousand years too old for you, he’s probably got ten girlfriends. Cannelle couldn’t be more obvious about how she wants him, but he doesn’t give her the time of day even though she’s a beautiful woman. So what chance do you have? None, that’s what. (Frost 143)

After taking her to a movie where two characters, one of whom is named Catherine, engage in sex, Dreamsnatcher made a move on Cat. She rejected him not because she’s disinterested but because she feared sex. He pressed the issue, reminding her he wasn’t going to wait around for her any longer. Huge manipulation tactic. Dreamsnatcher asserted they would have sex the following night but before they could, he learned that Mencheres was on his way to remove Cat from his custody. He told Cat that the bad vampire was coming for her, so they had to run away. If Cat bound herself to him (via vampire marriage), then she and her family would be safe from harm; Cat practically threw herself at him to do it because she was so frightened. Afterwards, Dreamsnatcher wanted to consummate their marriage, and right before penetration, Mencheres burst into the room. He imprisoned Dreamsnatcher and wiped Cat’s memory and sent her back home safe and sound (ish).

            I can’t ignore the obvious pedophilia (or hebephilia if you want to get technical, which I don’t). Cat is still under the care of her mother and grandparents; thus, she is not an adult, and her capability of consent is questionable. Dreamsnatcher is thousands of years old according to Cat. No Romeo and Juliet law is going to give them a blessing. Ages aside, he performs classic grooming behavior on her by getting her alone in his mansion, giving her gifts and compliments of her physical appearance, showing her a sexually explicit scene in a movie, and touching/kissing her. Cat is the victim of this, but nobody sees it that way. Before Cat gains her memory back, Bones states that she only wants to get it back so she can remember how much better Dreamsnatcher is than him. He implies that they had sex during the missing timeframe, and this offensive scene where the hymen myth is perpetuated follows.

“I bled my first time with Danny, got it? Or do you need me to draw you a picture?”

Under normal circumstances, I would never say something so personal with a crowd, but rage is funny. It makes you oblivious to everything else.

Bones drew his face right up next to mine. “That sod could have shagged you all night, and you’d have still bled with Danny later. All Mencheres would have needed to do was give you his blood once he found you. Heals all wounds, right? If they took you from Gregor shortly after the first time he’d bedded you, you’d have had a simple wound that could have been healed.” (Frost 86)

            I found it hard to finish reading this novel. I wanted to rage-quit many times. The subject matter was difficult to handle, and the way the characters bungled it was upsetting to say the least. There’s an unfortunate pedophilic theme throughout the book. I implore you not to read this pedophile-excusing pile of trash. Cat meets a ghoul named Liza who used to sleep with Bones. She thinks Liza is maybe 14 based on her physical appearance, and Cat feels a protectiveness towards her.

…I had a strangely protective feeling about Liza, absurd as that was. One, she was dead, so she didn’t need my protection. Two, judging from the discreet flashes of her gaze at Bones, she was in love with him.

Pedophile!

“Liza, would you please inform Cat how old you were when you were changed?” Bones asked, giving me a pointed look. “I’m about to be assaulted because of a misassumption.” (Frost 50)

            Liza clarifies that she was 17 when she died, and Cat is okay with it because “at least that wasn’t a felony in current times.” Again, I feel the need to emphasize that Romeo and Juliet laws most likely do not apply here. Bones is several hundreds of years older than Liza. Plus, there’s something to be said about him having sex with a person who appears younger than she really is. And then there’s this exchange between Cat and Bones towards the end of the novel:

“With those covers up to your chin and your eyes so wide, you look very young.”

“I guess that makes you the would-be pedophile.”

He inclined his head. “Considering our age difference and all the things I intend to do to you, it does indeed.” (Frost 263)

             Cat comes out of her stupor after remembering what happened between her and Dreamsnatcher and instead of wanting to murder him, she kisses him. He initiates sex with her and that reminds of her Bones, which triggers her into stabbing him in the back with a silver knife. She purposefully doesn’t kill him for reasons she doesn’t state. I want to say this was Frost’s attempt at representing the conflict of feelings victims of sexual abuse might feel towards their abusers, but any inference I make about that is probably inadvertent on the author’s part.

            This book showcases Cat’s personality flaws in a big way. Bones and Cat go to an opera and while waiting in line for the bathroom, Cat notices a woman admiring Bones’s butt. She confronts the woman because that’s normal behavior.

“If you can’t stand for your man to be admired, you would do better to keep him at home.”

With her heavy French accent, her h’s were almost silent. You can’t kill her just because she’s a tramp. I reminded myself. Even if you could have her body discreetly disposed of . . .

“He fucks even better than he looks,” I settled on saying. Several heads turned. I didn’t care; I was pissed. “And that beautiful face is going to be clamped between my legs as soon as we get ooome, don’t you worry.” (Frost 19)

            Cat’s immediate thought is to kill this woman for her offense of looking at Cat’s husband in public, and when she realizes she can’t, she resorts to childish bragging (and slut-shaming!). It’s crass and immature. It shows her insecurity in herself and her relationship when she lashes out at the woman. Not to mention how she mocks the woman’s French accent in an opera house in Paris, France. I can’t imagine visiting a foreign country and mocking a citizen’s accent to their face. The people around her either laugh at her comments or avoid eye contact, so it isn’t like Cat’s being challenged to be a better person.

            At one point, Cat visits Spade’s house. He has a beautiful mansion that makes Cat feel insecure about her poor upbringing. Her reaction is to insult it and then provide an empty apology. Spade is a baron, so what did Cat expect if not a stunning, expensive house?

Open mouth, insert foot. “Your home is lovely,” I said. “Don’t mind me. I’ll get manners when pigs fly.” (Frost 33)

This is a pattern for Cat. When she feels threatened, she’s rude to people. When she’s angry, she’s rude. When she’s upset, she’s rude. You get the point. She almost never apologizes but when she does, it puts the emphasis on the other person.

“Um, I didn’t mean you. Just ignore everything I say, we’ll both be better off.” (Frost 18)

That brings me to my next point. Cat voluntarily leaves her job in the previous book. Her job had become too dangerous for her, so she quit. She’s still hunting down vampires. It’s just that now she isn’t being paid by the government to do it. Seems like a bad deal to me. Cat’s allowed to have regrets but why does she have to take it out on everybody else?

“Nicely done, Commander,” Cooper commented.

“Stop calling me that.”

I didn’t mean to sound so sharp, Cooper just didn’t realize the title kept reminding me that my position as leader was forever gone. (Frost 92-93)

            She’s self-centered. Her cat still doesn’t have a name.

“What about my cat?” I’d set him up for enough food for a couple of days, but not for an extended trip. (Frost 4)

            She’s xenophobic.

Bones spoke to them in the same language, his accent sounding as authentic as theirs.

“You didn’t tell me you knew French,” I murmured. (Frost 13)

“Then you remember the dream,” Mencheres stated. “That bodes ill.”

The fear of that made my reply snappy. “Hey, Walks Like An Egyptian, how about for once you drop the formal stuff and talk like you live in the twenty-first century?” (Frost 40)

Bueno, pero cuál es el problema?”

“English,” I reminded Juan. (Frost 44)

            Is there a word for being prejudiced against other religions? I found a slang term, creedism, which means the discrimination against someone or a group of people based on their religious beliefs. Either way, Cat is that as well. Meeting the undead voodoo queen of New Orleans, Marie “Majesty” Laveau:

From what I had heard about Marie, I half expected her to be seated on a throne, turbaned, with a headless chicken in one hand and a shrunken skull in the other. What I saw made me blink. (Frost 68)

            Here’s a side note about their brief stint in New Orleans. Cat and crew have been running around the globe trying to outrun Dreamsnatcher. At one point, they fly to New Orleans intending to use it as a hideout because it’ll be safer than most places as its population is mostly human. In the short story “Reckoning” that takes place before the events in Halfway to the Grave, Bones is informed about the supernatural population in New Orleans.

“How many ghouls and vampires live in the city?” Bones asked.

Jelani mulled it for a moment. “Year round, a few hundred. At Mardi Gras, that number doubles, easily. Humans aren’t the only ones to enjoy the city’s festival.”

Bugger. Which was why it was an ideal time of year for the LaLauries to hunt, of course. The abundance of people, alive and dead, made them blend that much more into a crowd.

I did the math. In 2004 when the short story takes place, the population of New Orleans is 443,430. If we assume “a few hundred” ghouls and vampires is roughly 400, then they represent a measly 0.0009% of the population. At Mardi Gras, the number doubles, meaning they amount to 0.0018%. The short story takes place prior to Hurricane Katrina so there is a bigger population than when Destined for an Early Grave takes place in 2009. That means there are more supernatural creatures in New Orleans then statistically speaking if the ratio is unaltered. A couple hundred isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things, but Bones and Jelani make it seem like a large amount, which gets changed to a small amount in this book.

I gave this book the highest score I’ve given so far for any of the books in this series because a major plot point is Bones leaving Cat. After Cat voluntarily goes to Dreamsnatcher, she returns home to Bones. She left because she thought Bones was going to die in an attack orchestrated by Dreamsnatcher if she didn’t, but it turns out she was tricked and Bones wasn’t in any danger of dying. Bones doesn’t know her reason for leaving and assumes she chose Dreamsnatcher over him. He’s beyond furious; he’s heartbroken thinking she chose another vampire over him. I knew it wouldn’t last, but I enjoyed it anyway. Their relationship is toxic, and neither of them are very good people.

Bones presumably moves on after this. He’s walled up in his Paris home with a woman, and he told his friends he has no wife when they came to call. Cat is terrified she’s lost him forever, but don’t worry, this doesn’t actually cause her to change her ways. She gets mad at herself for getting together with Bones in the first place. She disparages him for his previous profession as a prostitute, even though it wasn’t a choice he made happily.

Fuck him! my anger said. I always knew Bones would go back to his old tricks. A leopard can’t change his spots, right? Doesn’t have a wife, huh? Who needs you, anyway? (Frost 199)

That’s not okay to say about your husband, especially when he assumes you left him first. If he decides to find comfort in another woman now that he’s left Cat, that’s his business. Turns out, though, that Bones was pulling a fast one. He didn’t cheat on Cat, but he wanted people to think he was living it up in his newfound singledom so that Dreamsnatcher would try to provoke a fight with him. He almost succeeded if it wasn’t for Cat mucking things up again (by rescuing him from what she assumes is certain death).

Cat decides the only way to defeat Dreamsnatcher is by turning into a vampire. Hear her out, everybody, it’s a doozy. So far, the Dreamsnatcher has been able to find out where in the world Cat is by sneaking into her dreams, a power he can only use on humans. If she’s a vampire, he can’t sneak into her dreams anymore. There’s also some stuff about Cat hating vampires unconditionally and to accept that they aren’t all bad, she becomes one. It’s…odd. Even though she’s heartbroken over losing Bones, after “rescuing” him, she asks him to be her sire. (The justification for that being that if she asked anyone else to do it, Bones would kill them, so again, super healthy stuff.) Bones’s condition for agreeing is to have sex with her. They get back together, and Cat doesn’t have to face the consequences of her actions yet again.

Inconsistency: Cat performs oral sex on Bones and remarks that he tastes salty, but he can’t sweat or ejaculate anything but blood because he’s a vampire so what’s supposed to be salty?

            New dumb vampire names: Hopscotch, Band-Aid, Shrapnel, Maximus, Techno, and Chill. Surely Frost is taking the piss out of us. Any intimidation by vampires as a race is shattered by these names. They’re like if someone who knew nothing about gangs came up with names of gang members. I realized that female vampires don’t have nicknames (the exception being Majesty, but Bones insists on calling her Marie—condescending much?). There’s Francesca, Annette, Belinda, and Patra. There are far fewer female vampires mentioned than male vampires in this series, which is its own inherent problem since women outnumber men in the general population.

            It turns out that Cat is a weird vampire. Her heart still beats sometimes, mostly when she’s emotional. She can only drink vampire blood. Her body shuts down automatically at sunrise. She even has a rare superpower that she discovers right in the nick of time during a battle her side was about to lose. (Vampire powers don’t manifest until decades later after changing and she’s been a vampire for a few weeks at most.) She absorbs the powers of all the vampires she drinks from, so she has a seemingly endless ability to gain vampire powers.

Dreamsnatcher somehow knew that she was going to gain this ability as a vampire, which is what spurred him to pick her up as a teen. His goal was to be her sire and have control over her. He has pursued her so hard in this book because he wanted to be the one who changed her. As a way of getting Cat to come back to him after she left him for Bones, Dreamsnatcher kidnaps Cat’s mom and turns her into a vampire, keeping her leashed like a deranged pet. I don’t really understand how that would make Cat change her mind but by the time it happens, Cat has already been turned into a vampire so it’s all for naught. Rodney, Justina’s ghoul boyfriend and Bones’s friend, dies trying to rescue her from Dreamsnatcher.

In the end, Dreamsnatcher and Bones duel to the death shirtless over Cat as is the vampire way. Cat cheats when Bones is losing, but it’s okay because Dreamsnatcher cheated first. There’s Law Guardians presiding over the whole thing, and they dole out punishment as they see fit. The story ends quickly afterwards. I’m interested in seeing how Justina deals with being a vampire seeing as she vehemently hates them, but I’m sure that’s going to get botched. Mark my words.

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