I've been reading through the books in Paranormal 13, a free book that I downloaded with 13 stories from various authors.

Does this sound familiar? Two vampire brothers, one a good boy and the other a bad boy, in love with the same girl. The girl’s best friend is a witch and they all live in a small Southern town.
Ding-Ding-Ding! Yep, Vampire Diaries! But this book wasn’t Vampire Diaries; it was a copycat rip-off. It was so much like Vampire Diaries that I thought, “This must have been the book that Vampire Diaries tv series was based off of because nobody would be so lame as to write a book that is almost exactly the same, would they?” so I looked it up. And no, the series was based off of books called The Vampire Diaries. The first book was published in 1991. This book was published in 2013 so it definitely was the copycat.

The author even used the words that are trademark Vampire Diary words like “compel” and “founding” which just made the copycatting more blatant. Then there was the rings, spelled by a witch, that allows them walk in the sunlight which is also something that was original to Vampire Diaries, at least, in all my hundreds of paranormal books that I have read, I have never seen that used…until now. These similarities cannot be coincidence. I guess they can be but I think this author couldn’t come up with her own story so she just copied another story.

I’ll give you a summary and you can judge for yourselves.

Zachary and Sam Degaud died and became vampires during the Civil War. Sam has always been the good brother, trying to keep Zac out of trouble but Zac always seems to find it anyway. A few years ago, they moved back to their hometown and into the mansion that was once owned by their family during the Civil War.

Sam works as a gardener but Zac sits around drinking heavily every day. He feels he doesn’t have to work since they are rich. They met a girl named Liz who they both had feelings for even though Zac is too much of a bad boy to admit it. A year ago, a vampire attacked Liz and turned her. Sam found her in the woods and thought she was dead but when she woke up, he knew she was a vampire. He helped her through it and they have been together ever since. But Zac secretly pines for her.
They all can walk around in the daylight because they found a witch who spelled some rings to allow them to stand the sun.

Liz’s best friend is Gabrielle, a witch who is just discovering her powers. She grew up not knowing that she was a witch but always knew something was strange about herself. She found a note from her Grandmother who she calls “Grams” (sound familiar?) and a grimoire in the attic of her parent’s home when she was moving out into her own apartment. She remembers her grandmother ran away when Gabby was around 10 years old because her grandfather wanted to commit her to a mental hospital. Now, she wants to find her grandmother to help her with her magic.

Liz and Gabby also have another childhood friend named Alex but he is just a regular human and has no idea that Liz, Zac and Sam are vampires and Gabby is a witch. He is a gardener just like Sam.
Liz and Sam don’t like feeding off people so they feed off animals in the woods. While they are hunting one day, a pack of werewolves in human form harass them and tell them to stay off their land but it isn’t really their land. They just don’t like vampires and are trying to make encroach on their town.

They all hang out at the bar a lot. While at the bar one day, an unknown vampire approaches Zac and asks him if he has seen a dark haired female vampire. Zac knows that vampires think you are lying if you look away from them and even though he has not seen this dark haired vampire, he looks away from the ancient vampire anyway. Zac is an ass and just looks for trouble, not caring about the consequences. So this vampire, Alistair, gets angry and doesn’t believe Zac. They end up going into the woods and fighting. Zac kills the vampire even though he’s faster and stronger because he is a lot older. A witch named Katrin appears out of nowhere and tells Zac that she will get revenge on him by hurting everyone he cares about and then she disappears.

Come to find out, this witch is actually a ghost witch with a lot of power. She is one of the five “founding’ witches who betrayed the other four “founding’ witches because she wanted more power by creating the “founding” vampires. Gabby tells her friends that she has a spell in her grimoire that can call someone called “The Witch Hunter” so they do the spell using Zac’s blood. He’s just the one who offered since Gabby couldn’t use her own for some reason.

Aya is the witch hunter. She wakes up in a cave near Zac and Sam’s hometown after being asleep since the Civil War. She is over 2,000 years old and is a vampire but she is more than just a vampire. She has abilities that no other vampire has like she can enter people’s homes without being invited, she can ingest silver and garlic and she can rip apart people with very little effort. Her eyes also turn white when she is upset. The author tries to make her mysterious and badass. She wakes up and compels people into giving her clothes and food and whatever else she needs to live. She amazingly gets up to speed on what has happened in the world while she has been asleep by going to a bookstore and reading about it.

I have to say that Aya was the only original character in the story. She has embraced the fact that she is cold and has lost touch with her “humanity” but she has enough control to be able to blend in with regular people when she has to. Aya is the only redeeming quality to this book, not that I really liked her that much but because she is the only thing in the book that is original.
She agrees to help the group of friends with their Katrin problem, more because Katrin is also threatening her than because she wants to help out of the goodness of her own heart.

I’m not going to give away the ending of the book but it is a bit of a shocker and a cliffhanger. Now, I know it is a recurring them in the books of Paranormal 13. Every single book that I have finished is a cliffhanger.

I think if I had never watched Vampire Diaries, I would have liked this book but since I have watched it and since this book is almost a duplicate with the names changed and minor differences, I can’t like it. This author needs to come up with her own story and stop copying someone else.

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Gave up about halfway through. I just couldn't take any more. Maybe it gets better? I will never know.

Also spoiler: It reads like a Vampire Diaries rip off. ( )

After the first 3 chapters i was unsure of this book, but once half way i really enjoyed it and have moved on the 2nd in the series already.

The book has all the usual supernatural elements, vampires, werewolves, witches but adds in a new element of "founders" i.e. the first vampire, witch. If you get into the story, then the unusual ending of the first book will make you reach for the 2nd straight away ( )

I’m not sure exactly how this story ended up with so many 4 and 5 star reviews. I set this book aside a number of times and almost gave up on it altogether.

This tale of 2 brothers in LA, have been vampires since the Civil War. They’ve been back in their hometown for quite awhile now, blending in with the humans who don’t know that vampires exist. Zac is a jerk and his mouth keeps getting them in trouble. Sam, his younger brother, is much easier going. When they are targeted by a dead witch who can control vampires, they have a friend, a witch just learning about her power, to work a spell that calls the Witch Hunter to aid them.

I really can’t find anything to recommend this book, even though it was free. The world building, which could be explained by the witch hunter, is written off as a secret that shouldn’t be shared. We do get a little at the end of the story. Character building is lacking to the point that I could care less what happened to any of them. And omigod, their answer to most things is to drink alcohol, even though it would take a lot to make them drunk. Do we see anyone get drunk? Don’t know. But they swig it directly from a bottle.

You’ve got to stick with the story until well over the 1/2 way mark before things start happening that at least adds some interest. The major confrontation isn’t detailed enough for us to know how the dead witch’s anchor to the in-between is dissolved.

There is a cliffhanger, but for me, the entire story fell off the cliff. ( )