A friend wanted me to ask if anyone can identify these two books-
A children’s book about a Vampire-King who keeps his wives alive & enthralled to him by giving them a magical wine. One woman actually loves him & when his heart is revealed to be bound in iron, she gives up her heart to him so that he might experience emotion. He realizes he loves her so he places his old heart over a flame to melt away the iron & put it into her.
From searching the Net, the closest I’ve seen is The Darkangel by Meredith Ann Pierce. If anyone’s read it, could you confirm?
A woman marries a man who is disgusted to find she is not a virgin, having borne a child as a result of rape (the child now living in a convent). He fathers three children by her, forcing her to nurse so long her breasts are distended, and also forcing her to overeat & get fat & undesirable to anyone. He carries on affairs & when she objects, threatens to molest their three children- a older girl, a middle boy, and a young girl. She finally kills him, beheads the oldest daughter & the son while he was in bed with a woman. The youngest daughter escapes & is adopted by a psychiatrist who puts her into a rebirthing therapy. She grows up to marry a psychiatrist & has three children- girl, boy, girl. Psych hubby is having affair with live-in babysitter. She remembers the massacre. Her half-sister who was raised in the convent now comes on the scene- grown up to be a nun. Her grown son & daughter get involved in a sex club & are being blackmailed as photos were taken of them having sex with each other. I think these three children end up getting murdered but my friend wasn’t sure if their mother or the Nun did it.
I think The Darkangel Trilogy is correct for the first book. The wine isn’t ringing a bell, though, and his heart was encased in lead, not iron, but that’s pretty close.
> A woman marries a man who is disgusted to find she is not a virgin, having
> borne a child as a result of rape (the child now living in a convent). He fathers
> three children by her, forcing her to nurse so long her breasts are distended,
> and also forcing her to overeat & get fat & undesirable to anyone. He carries on
> affairs & when she objects, threatens to molest their three children- a older girl,
> a middle boy, and a young girl. She finally kills him, beheads the oldest
> daughter & the son while he was in bed with a woman. The youngest daughter
> escapes & is adopted by a psychiatrist who puts her into a rebirthing therapy.
> She grows up to marry a psychiatrist & has three children- girl, boy, girl. Psych
> hubby is having affair with live-in babysitter. She remembers the massacre. Her
> half-sister who was raised in the convent now comes on the scene- grown up
> to be a nun. Her grown son & daughter get involved in a sex club & are being
> blackmailed as photos were taken of them having sex with each other. I think
> these three children end up getting murdered but my friend wasn’t sure if their
> mother or the Nun did it.
Well, if I had written that novel, I’d have called it The Aristocrats.
Yes, this is totally The Darkangel. The details are off–
He doesn’t give the women a magical wine; he kidnaps them and drinks their souls. (Or maybe he collects their souls in order to give them to his mother–I don’t quite remember.) He’s actually a vampyre-in-training–once he collects 14 wives, he’ll become a real vampyre. At first, he kidnaps the heroine, Aeriel, as a maid to tend to his soulless wives and spin them clothing–then he decides that she would be the perfect wife to round out his collection. She has fallen in love with him, but still knows he’s evil, and she wants to both stop him and save him. So at their marriage ceremony, she tricks him into drinking a sleeping potion, and then cuts out his heart and replaces it with her own. The darkangel doesn’t actually save her–it’s Aeriel’s friend the duarough (i.e. dwarf) who melts the lead away from the darkangel’s heart and places it in Aeriel’s chest.
Oh, and by the way, it’s set on the moon. The terraformed, medieval moon.
The Darkangel books are extremely weird, but really wonderful and imaginative, some of the best fantasy I’ve ever read! You (or your friend) should also check out Meredith Ann Pierce’s The Woman Who Loved Reindeer. It has nothing to do with the Darkangel Trilogy, but it’s by the same author and is also wonderful.
well, Amazon & other sites I checked seemed to indicate it, but I see it also involves a haunting, and my friend says there was nothing supernatural about it.
So we’ve still got 50-50. Thanks, tho!
They’re wrong–it doesn’t involve a haunting. The mother is only haunted by her memories and what she thinks is a family curse.
Trust me, this is the second book you described.
