Aside from continually using his hypnotic powers to maneuver women into doing what he wants, we can also ascribe to Jander a pattern of making promises he doesn't even attempt to fulfill. Despite pledging to Anna that he would solve the mystery of her madness, he stays in Strahd's castle for TEN YEARS without doing much of anything. Seriously, he's got this sworn quest and he gardens at Strahd's place for ten fucking years instead of displaying a trace of follow-through.
Thus far I haven't really commented on
Golden's writing. The best thing I can say about it is that it is
workmanly. There are no attempts at artistry here, and I'm better
off for it as they would definitely fail entirely. Her real weakness
as an author is dialog; she has a tin ear when it comes to the way
people actually talk to each other. Worse yet, out-of-place phrases
slip into the prose. Anastasia describes her unborn child as
“kicking like mad”; another character answers in the negative
with a teenage mall-crawler's “Nope.”
Actually, I take that back. The worst
thing about Golden's writing is her inability to resist the
temptation that comes with a protagonist who is largely unaffected by
the passing of years; that is, since Jander is a vampire she feels no
qualms about advancing the novel's time-line by leaps and bounds.
This has two very unfortunate effects: first, it results in secondary
characters who aren't around long enough to be developed or for the
reader to care about, and two, it really makes it seem like Jander is
just loafing around Castle Ravenloft and not actually trying to solve
the mystery that he pledged to see through.
Speaking of character development,
Golden's Strahd is a bit of a furry. Toward the middle of the novel,
Strahd brings his new werewolf girlfriend to the castle: “'She
makes an excellent spy and a merry bedfellow.' He turned his
attention back to the wolf.” Note that Strahd praises Trina's
sexual prowess while she's in wolf form. Castle Yiffenloft, right?
Also, soon after Jander has another in what are becoming a series of
annoying and poorly-crafted flashbacks; this time, he recalls an
incident where he was saved by a weredolphin. Let me type that out
again in capital letters in case your mind repressed the word I just
used: WEREDOLPHIN. Golden has included a weredolphin in her story.
That is an amazing lapse of taste, judgment, and decency. Jander
doesn't mention how fuckable the weredolphin was at least.
So, remember the Jander is some sort of
shining, radiant elf guy? Well, he's so solar-powered that he gets
mistaken for Lathander Morninglord, god of the sun, by a priest of
that deity. It's important to Golden that we know that Jander isn't
just shit-hot, he's as shit-hot as a god. This distresses Strahd a
little bit; adopting a very 90210 pose he accuses Jander of upstaging
him at some gala party that Strahd has thrown in his own honor.
This, more than anything so far, illustrates what vampires are in
Golden's novel: they are pick-up artists who peacock around and trick
women into sleeping with them/letting them feed off them.
In what seems like a bizarre narrative
misfire, Golden has the young cleric Sasha drown one of Strahd's
vampire brides. At first I thought this was invoking the whole
“vampires can't cross running water” thing, but the description
really focuses on the water filling the vampire's mouth and
nostrils—and Strahd explicitly states that someone drowned his
vampire lady. Chew on that for a moment; I'm over two-hundred pages
into a vampire novel and the author of said novel hasn't yet realized
that vampires don't breath and therefore can't drown.