Synopsis:
From the author of “Unicorn Western” comes a story of fangs and fast food…
When overweight treadmill salesman Reginald Baskin finally meets a co-worker who doesn’t make fun of him, it’s just his own bad luck that tech guy Maurice turns out to be a thousand-year-old vampire.
And when Maurice turns Reginald to save his life, it’s just Reginald’s own further bad luck that he wakes up to discover he’s become the slowest, weakest, most out-of-shape vampire ever born, doomed to “heal” to his corpulent self for all of eternity.
As Reginald struggles with the downsides of being a fat vampire — too slow to catch people to feed on, mocked by those he tries to glamour, assaulted by his intended prey and left for undead — he discovers in himself rare powers that few vampires have… and just in time too, because the Vampire Council might just want his head for being an inferior representative of their race.
Fat Vampire is the story of an unlikely hero who, after having an imperfect eternity shoved into his grease-stained hands, must learn to turn the afterlife’s lemons into tasty lemon danishes.
Review:
What a fun and refreshing ride this was! Read the book description please. See the feeling that you’re getting? Like… this sounds fun and original and perhaps without the usual cliches that you encounter in most vampire books. And yes, it’s confirmed! That’s exactly what the book is. The synopsis is not at all deceiving, you’ll get exactly what you’re expecting.
Reginald Baskin is…well… fat. There’s no other word you’d think about when it comes to describing him. You know how sometimes you’re labeling people under a single term? That charming neighbor, the cute grocery girl, the kind cleaning lady, the bitchy office colleague, the dumb gym trainer, etc? Well, everyone who’s ever met Reginald would probably have him in their minds under “the fat guy” stamp. His life is boring and mediocre, he has no friends, he hates his work, his colleagues, his body, he’s not special or interesting in any ways and nothing ever happens. Until that night when, by mistake, he’s turned into a vampire. And surprise-surprise! Nothing changes! Nothing. He’s still fat. Still sweaty and lazy and slow. He still loves pizzas and fried chicken. People still mock him. And he still hates his life. But when his existence is threatened, he might finally need to find some motivation under all those layers of fat.
I loved the story! So unexpected and fun and totally not something that you’ve read before! Especially since the general idea is that vampires are cruel, cold hearted and absolutely gorgeous creatures that would charm you even without the help of their glamouring abilities. And Reginald is exactly the opposite of that. I loved the fact that he doesn’t change in any way, that eternity seems to be just as lame as his everyday human life was. His social interactions get a small improvement, but even this happens on a minimal level and mostly because of external factors, rather than his own will of changing things. Probably the only thing that I didn’t really like was the way Reginald unveils some surprises about his new self in the end. But overall, I don’t have a lot of complaints. Thinking about it, what Reginald does even as a vampire, in order to save his life and the lives of his dear ones are exactly his human habits: reading and watching YouTube videos.
I liked the other main characters, even if the author is not giving a very detailed insight into their minds. You get a basic idea about their motivations, but most of the time, each character is somehow caught in his own story, dealing with his own problems and, most importantly, not giving up on their whole lives in order to help Reginald. In so many books the secondary characters are becoming sidekicks of the protagonists that you forget that they should actually have their own lives and you end up seeing them only as extensions of the main heroes. I was pleasantly surprised to discover this is not the case in Fat Vampire.
There’s not a lot to debate about the novel. It comes with a bright idea, explores it in the best way possible, but it’s not a very deep or challenging story. It’s a fast and easy reading that will definitely cheer you up and offer you a new perspective of this overly used creatures that fantasy readers love obsessing over: vampires.
My Weekly Book 