Title: The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant
Series: Fred, the Vampire Accountant #1
Author: Drew Hayes
Genre: Paranormal/Urban Fantasy
Trigger Warnings: Death, body horror, blood, gore (mild), secondhand embarrassment, fatphobia
Back Cover:
Some people are born boring. Some live boring. Some even die boring. Fred managed to do all three, and when he woke up as a vampire, he did so as a boring one. Timid, socially awkward, and plagued by self-esteem issues, Fred has never been the adventurous sort.
One fateful night – different from the night he died, which was more inconvenient than fateful – Fred reconnects with an old friend at his high school reunion. This rekindled relationship sets off a chain of events thrusting him right into the chaos that is the parahuman world, a world with chipper zombies, truck driver wereponies, maniacal necromancers, ancient dragons, and now one undead accountant trying his best to “survive.” Because even after it’s over, life can still be a downright bloody mess.
Review:
I picked this up mainly because of the author. The idea sounded okay, but I was really looking for my NPCs fix. I think that led me to have higher expectations than the book really deserved.
The writing here was solidly mediocre, which I expected. Like the Spells, Swords, & Stealth series, it wasn’t glaringly awful but it definitely wouldn’t be winning any awards. It did have some genuinely funny moments (although fewer than I’d hoped), but it also had a fair bit of secondhand embarrassment, which I hate.
Also, this book had no plot. I sometimes say a book had “no real plot” as a way of criticizing a weak, meandering, or unfocused plot, but in this case I’m being literal. There was zero overarching plot. It was more like a series of vignettes about the same characters combined into one volume. Said vignettes include:
- Fred goes to his high school reunion
- Fred and his girlfriend end up in a fantasy LARPing session on their way to the movies
- Fred and his girlfriend go to Las Vegas for Thanksgiving
- Fred and his friends track down a friend-of-a-friend’s missing mentor
- Fred and his friends attempt to rescue Fred’s kidnapped girlfriend
Admittedly, there were some supernatural shenanigans that made said vignettes slightly more interesting than they sound on the surface. Fred ends up in a legit jousting match in Vegas, the LARPing session is a little less imaginary than initially anticipated, and the story of Fred’s kidnapped girlfriend went in an interesting generational-trauma-allegory-with-body-horror direction that I did like. (However, not all of them hit the mark. The resolution to the case of the missing mentor especially was extremely anticlimactic and felt like a let-down overall.) But besides characters, there was nothing that connected the stories. Unless you count being a vampire who is also an accountant, which is a concept and not actually a plot.
It did get a little annoying that everyone seemed to know things about the world of supernatural creatures and just … nobody would think to tell Fred about it. He ended up making stupid decisions and getting embarrassed just because he lacked the knowledge about how the world worked. It’s a standard “the paranormal creatures live among us” Urban Fantasy-style world, but with some vaguely interesting details. My favorite part is that in this world, vampires are perfectly normal, but accountants are rare and interesting.
This book was occasionally witty and funny, and I’ll admit, the idea of a guy waking up a vampire and just going back to his accounting job was amusing. Objectively it wasn’t spectacular, or even all that great. It had some pretty big problems in my mind. All the same, it was fairly fun and entertaining enough to finish. I don’t plan to read the rest, but that doesn’t mean I won’t. If nothing else, they are light, fun, fairly silly reads, and sometimes you just need something like that.
The Fred, the Vampire Accountant series:
- The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant
- Undeath and Taxes
- Bloody Acquisitions
- The Fangs of Freelance
- Deadly Assessments
- Undeading Bells
- Out of House and Home
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