These vampires are the sort of desperate scary that really, really works for me. I love that it's set in Melbourne. I love that I could picture all these places in my head. I love all the things and I wish this review were more coherent. ( )

Harris has written a very clever vampire themed who-dunnit. I loved so many of the details of this story, from Gary — the young looking guy who is stuck in the 1960s, but is still trying to learn everything he can about science — to the loving detail in which Melbourne of the early 2000s is portrayed. Particularly the locations and details of the goth scene.

It being vampires, the deaths are more gruesome than in more cosy mysteries, but unlike a lot of the grim ‘realistic’ oeuvre, they aren’t presented for the titillation of the reader. Yes, we have unnamed young women dead, but unlike some books I’ve was, they aren’t paraded naked in lurid detail. Instead, the story focuses on the action of our protagonist, Lissa, who find the bodies.

We get a lot of Lissa’s back story throughout, through their interactions with their sibling and parents (the former being a force for good in Lissa’s life, the latter chaos and disappointment). Harris has done a spectacular job of capturing a particular dysfunctional family dynamic. There were certainly moments where I imagine many readers would have the same reaction I did — “I see, you’ve met my mother.”

The stand out relationships in the story are those of the two siblings, learning how to work together as adults, and the developing friendship between Lissa and Gary, which starts badly, and gets mishandled badly by Lissa. ( )

Prepare to have all your favourite vampire myths debunked! In The Opposite of Life by Narrelle Harris, you’ll meet a plucky librarian, Lissa, and Gary, a vampire whose fashion sense goes no further than garish Hawaiian shirts.

Harris’s novel is set in Melbourne and it’s lovely to read her depiction of a town she obviously knows so well. The detail she includes about the Melbourne streets will appeal to Australian readers and particularly those from Melbourne, but I wondered if it would hold the same appeal to non-locals – I suspect in the end those details will necessarily be glossed over by them but the settings will still be very effective.

“The night I went dancing with Evie I found two girls on the floor of the ladies’ loos, with their throats ripped out.”

This is a great opening line and what follows will make you laugh as self-absorbed Lissa bemoans how this is just typical of the stuff that happens to her – get dumped, mope, go out and find dead bodies. Harris’s depiction of Lissa and her turn of phrase had me laughing a lot. There is a really appealing dark humour to this novel blended with some lovely poignant moments.

Lissa has the wondrous fortune of getting over being dumped by meeting a young goth guy and the potential is there for “true love” – or at least that's her hope, until he is killed. Determined to find out who is ruining her life (it’s all about her at this stage) and who is killing people around her, Lissa undertakes her own investigations. This is how she meets Gary – the "daggy vamp" with a penchant for Hawaiian shirts. The development of both these characters is excellent.

A vampire in Hawaiian shirts – yep Harris chucks several vampire stereotypes out of the window and I love it. There are no tall dark and handsome, brooding vampires to take your breath away and romance you. They range from creepy stalker types, arrogant toffs, through to your ancient predatory (utterly unappealing) ones.

Occasionally I wanted the pacing of the novel to pick up, but really those moments were few and far between. There are no plot surprises about who is the bad guy or where the plot is heading. However, I found that neither of these mattered, because what I was enjoying was the development of the friendship between Lissa and Gary. Gary's friendship with a human makes him different to other vampires and sparks some fundamental changes within him.

There is an underlying theme with the work about the importance of social connections and what it means to be human - it was this that really carried the story for me.

Four Stars ( )

The Opposite of Life by Narrelle M Harris is the author's first published novel starring Lissa and Gary. I recently reviewed its sequel, Walking Shadows. I have to warn you, this review is coming from the position of having read the second book first and I can't avoid comparing the two. Blurb:

Lissa Wilson has seen more than enough death in her family, so when people start being savagely killed whenever she has a night out in Melbourne with her beautiful new boyfriend, she’s determined to investigate and to make the killing stop. Even when she realises the murders must be the work of a vampire.

Things had been looking up for this librarian and 21st century geekgirl, but the murders make her remember why she prefers books to people. People leave you. People can die.

She finds herself teaming up with the painfully awkward Gary to get to the undead heart of the matter. But there are more challenges in store than Gary’s appalling fashion sense.

The Opposite of Life introduces Lissa and Gary and the vampires of Melbourne. It's a somewhat darker book than Walking Shadows. There's a lot more death in it — the story centres around a series of murders and Lissa has the poor fortune to discover several of the bodies. The associated trauma, of course, leads her to be somewhat less than chipper and besides that she has a lot of other emotional baggage to come to terms with. And since Lissa meets Gary for the first time part way through the book, there's less opportunity for entertaining interactions between them. I liked that in Walking Shadows they were well established as friends.

The vampire mythos in Harris's world is refreshing in not being overly romanticised. Vampires don't feel much because they're dead. Their brains also don't work as well and they get firmly entrenched in old habits. Modern technology has made it harder for them to not draw attention to themselves and so they're not generally inclined to run around killing people willy-nilly (any more).

Harris juxtaposes the numb emotions of the vampires with humans, mostly various members of Lissa's family, who don't want to feel any more and deal with it using more conventional means (drugs, alcohol, etc). It is the appeal of not feeling which is the lure to vampirism for some of the characters in this story, not just eternal life and youth, but the promise that it will hurt less to live an undead life. An interesting notion and not one that comes up too often in vampire fiction. Not that there aren't a lot of jaded vampires around, but often they're that way thanks to their longevity.

I enjoyed The Opposite of Life quite a bit and I look forward to reading more Lissa and Gary stories in the future. I enjoyed Walking Shadows a bit more, though, mainly because it was cheerier and caused more laughs. I highly recommend this series to anyone looking for less conventional vampire fiction. An excellent panacea for the reader sick of Edward Cullens and (YA-ified) Lestats.

4 / 5 stars

You can read more of my reviews on my blog. ( )

You probably can't find this unless you're in Australia, or have a friend who picked up a copy from the publisher at a science fiction convention. It is worth hunting down. The heroine is tough, vulnerable, smart and brave. it takes 'dysfunctional family' in a most interesting direction. It is a vampire book, but the most significant vampire character is kind of a nerd, and a nice guy.