Review: "Jennifer the Damned"

When my mother sat me down at the kitchen table one night, about a month before my 

class was scheduled to receive Holy Communion, I had no idea she was about to tear my world apart. My mind could not conceive of anything worse than that she was going to have to work a double shift again.

‘Jennifer, you won’t be receiving Communion with the rest of your class.’

Tiny shards of pink crystal hope exploded inside my heart, lacerating my dreams. ‘Why?’

‘Communion is not meant for us.’

‘Sister Joan says it’s meant for everyone, to save our souls from the devil.’

My mother smiled her crooked, perverse smile. ‘Jennifer, you and I … we don’t have souls.’

—Karen Ullo, Jennifer the Damned

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So not only is Catholic vampire fiction its whole own subgenre, we have a Facebook page now! We are: Karen Ullo (Jennifer the Damned), Eleanor Bourg Nicholson (A Bloody Habit), J. B. Toner (Whisper Music), and myself (Death’s Dream Kingdom). I’ll be reviewing my three compatriots’ novels, beginning here with Mrs Ullo’s book, which I got last week and whose nigh-400-pages I devoured in just a few days. (All four novels, I believe, can be purchased on Amazon; I have included direct-from-publisher links for each, both because the books are sometimes cheaper that way and because screw Amazon.)

Jennifer the Damned is set in contemporary Louisiana and California. The titular Jennifer was stolen from her birth mother by the lovely, heartless, and masterful Helen Carshaw, a vampire centuries old, who chose Jennifer as her protégé. She raises Jennifer as her own daughter—feeding her only the raw or rare meat that she can digest—and places her in Catholic school, in order to nurture her in both knowledge of God’s love for humanity and hatred that that love is withheld from the likes of them.

As the novel opens, Helen has disappeared, and Jennifer Carshaw has been in the care of a small convent of teaching nuns for a few years. She has been receiving a robustly Catholic education, and even a fairly normal high-school-misfit social experience—save that she alone is excluded from the sacraments, and especially from the Communion, that she so badly yearns for and envies her classmates for being able to access.

But Jennifer is experiencing her transfiguration into a full-fledged vampire, and the insatiable bloodlust that goes with it. The very smell of the Precious Blood at Mass drives her close to blind frenzy. Left to navigate undeath on her own, Jennifer decides to attempt a balance between her secret life as a vampire and the life she wants as a human being.

Here Be Spoilers

(Jump to Next Section to Skip Them)

The attempt, though valiant, fails. Jennifer learns a degree of self-control and develops the cunning to dispose of her kills without leaving any incriminating evidence behind, but she cannot truly balance the demands of the human life she has led till now with the new urges of the vampire: after a handful of anonymous disappearances, she loses control and kills the boy she has been dating. Around the same time, Helen’s bizarre plans, which involved turning a classmate of Jennifer’s named Jeremy into a vampire as her ‘brother,’ gradually become clearer: Jennifer despairs of ever managing a semblance of human life at home, and, as the FBI zero in on her, finding more and more evidence of her murders, she deserts the nuns and her school, adopting a false identity and telling Jeremy how to reach her later.

A few years later, while she is living in Los Angeles and working as a makeup artist, she meets someone new, a young actor named Conner who takes a shine to her. She begins toying once again with the idea of leading a human life, at least part of the time. But Jeremy, who is now experiencing his own growth into full vampire-hood, comes to find her: abandoned by their pseudo-mother, they have only each other to rely on as fellow undead. Nevertheless Jennifer opens herself up, little by little, to Conner’s increasing affection and seriousness about their relationship. Against all her prior experience, Jennifer even begins to see signs of mortality returning to her body—until her false identity is exposed and, like a pantomime demon out of a trap-door, Helen emerges. Helen informs them that she, Jennifer, has become the most pathetic of creatures, a mortal vampire, and demands that her two pseudo-children kill Conner and come with her; driven by rebellion and revenge for the humanity she took from them, they instead destroy her.

Jennifer leaves Conner, hospitalized after their confrontation with Helen, with a note expressing her regret and her love for him, and returns to Louisiana and the nuns. She confesses what she has been and done, including all her murders, and agrees to face justice, asking only to receive the Eucharist first, now that she at long last is sure she has a soul. The priest consents, she drinks the Precious Blood, and there the novel ends.

(Spoilers End)

Here Be Lit-Crit

Jennifer the Damned is comparable to Twilight in premise, yet with the superior craftsmanship of Anne Rice. It takes the psychological and spiritual gravity of being a vampire seriously, in a way that many of its rivals fail to do, even Dracula, whose vampires are indeed evil but merely evil, without the depth of a human sinner or even of a fallen angel like the possessed Weston of Perelandra. Feeling cut off from humanity not merely in a social way, but in an urgently sacramental sense, is something I’ve rarely come across outside of Rice’s work. I wonder whether the choice of Louisiana, such an important location in Interview With the Vampire, may itself be a tribute to Rice. (Louisiana has become virtually the Transylvania of Southern Gothic, also popping up in Vampire: The Requiem and the stories of Jacques St Germain).

Structurally, the novel works well enough; stylistically, though it has a few sags into cliché, it’s generally very good—better than Dracula. But where Jennifer the Damned really shines is its pacing. This is itself a cliché, I know, but I couldn’t put it down! I always needed to know what was going to happen next: I cared what happened to Jennifer and the people around her.

If the novel has weaknesses, they are two: audience grasp of the mechanics of vampirism, and the ending. Now, it is appropriate that we don’t fully understand how being a vampire works at the beginning, partly because we the readers are learning with Jennifer as the story progresses. However, a major mechanical shift away from what we had been led to think, one that’s highly plot-relevant, takes place fairly close to the end without really being foreshadowed. This leaves us feeling more like the mechanics have been fiddled with to convenience the plot, than that we are continuing to learn with Jennifer and that if we’d been a little cannier with the facts we had we might have seen this twist coming. It’s not a fatal flaw but it’s the worse of the two, in my opinion.

The other flaw is that the closing feels kind of rushed. Jennifer’s love interest in the last third of the book falls for her so quickly that I was inclined to put it down to vampire charm, but then that explanation seemed to be repudiated, which resulted in the romance coming across as over-idealized—though, to be fair, not cloying or problematic like Stephenie Meyer’s; the characters’ behavior and dialogue stays convincing. The one truly important death of the book happens with little fanfare, which was a real disappointment. And while I can’t quite bring myself to call this a problem—because if I’m truthful, it’s kind of the point of the book—I am furious over the openness of the very end! I want there to be sequels so I can find out, even indirectly, what happened.

Should You Read It?

If you are a fan of vampire literature or coming-of-age stories, definitely! All in all I give Jennifer the Damned a B+, with the note that it could’ve gotten an A- if Ullo had stuck the landing just a little better (and if there are sequels I am optimistic that she will). Go forth and buy.

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