LET IT BLEED is book 3.5 of the WVMP RADIO urban fantasy series by my friend Jeri Smith-Ready, and is what happens when the publisher decides they want four books instead of five and the author turns the salient events of book four into a novella to offer her readers for free so she can wrap up the series in a way she feels is satisfying.
This is in every way awesome. And the novella is, in and of itself, fine. My problem is with a decision Jeri’s made for the direction of the series, which is perhaps not entirely fair, but OTOH, well, shit, man. Spoilers for WVMP RADIO behind the cut.
The nutshell summary of WVMP RADIO is “young con artist trying to go straight helps a radio station set up a promotional thing where ‘all our DJs are vampires and they only play music from the decade they were made, because vampires can’t evolve past the time they died!’ Only of course she’s selling the absolute truth. Hijinks ensue.”
…and in book 3, Ciara, our heroine, becomes a vampire. And I really, really did not want that to happen, so I came into LET IT BLEED with a bad taste in my mouth.
It is *possible* that Jeri has really good storytelling reasons for having made that decision, and I can see those potential ramifications quite clearly. Things that would be game-changers for the WVMP world. And if that’s where she’s going with it, well, okay.
If it’s not where she’s going with it, I’m going to be very, very disappointed in the series as a whole. And perhaps that’s not fair. Perhaps it’s not fair to be disappointed because it’s Not The Story I Wanted. God knows there are a lot of 1-star reviews on Amazon that are pissed off because the author didn’t tell the story the reader wanted, and I appreciate that hey, writers don’t always do that. But what they do need to do is convince me that the story they’ve told is better than the one I want them to tell, and the jury is still out on WVMP RADIO.
I will, though, be reading the last book to find out what happens, so at least she’s got me through the end of the series.