“Immortalis Carpe Noctem,” by Katie Salidas

Katie Salidas is, or I should say was, an unknown author to me. I have begun to follow numerous authors on twitter in the past months, but Ms. Salidas began to follow me first. I found her to be an excellent conversationalist, willing to chat at the drop of a, eh… tweet. She’s known on twitter as @QuixoticKatie… the name alone intrigued and caused me to watch her stream and what she posts.

Generally, new authors email me or tweet me to request that I read and review their books. Ms. Salidas never did this. She has promoted her books herself and with the affection that she whips up in her following. One day, I caught a random tweet where she was promoting, “Immortalis Carpe Noctem.” I browsed the link a couple of times, but honestly, I didn’t care for the cover. This is the truth. I did it… I judged a book by it’s cover!

I’m not sure exactly how the conversation came up but Ms. Salidas offered me a one time opportunity to download one of her books to read and review. I chose “Immortalis Carpe Noctem” because I really wanted to start the series at the beginning. Go figure.

I’m really hard on storylines. I have to tell myself that I have to read past the first couple of chapters, because quite honestly what I do is read the first chapter and if I’m not gripped in the storyline right there, I lay the book down and don’t pick it up again.

“Immortalis Carpe Noctem,” is written in first person and it is all the experiences of a young college aged woman who decides to walk home by herself in one of the roughest cities in America, Las Vegas. Of course, reading Alyssa’s point of view, she took us through her walk in the dark and introduced us first to her attackers who intended on raping, mugging, and killing her. They succeed at nearly killing her by stabbing her as she attempted to free herself. However, during her scuffle with her would be attackers, an ancient vampire named, Lysander, arrives just a little late to her rescue. Instead of taking her to a hospital to receive life saving skills from a doctor, he chooses instead to drain her further and then give her his blood thus turning her into a vampire.

At first, my thought was that this was just going to be another vampire love story. It wasn’t really. Actually, this author went one-step further. This whole story is Alyssa’s first hand experience of becoming a vampire and learning how to live as one in the twenty-first century. She has rules she must abide by, new senses to discover.

Ms Salidas kept with many, if not all, of vampire folklore. Her vampires can’t take sunlight, they live off of human blood, and of course they all have fangs.

So, what is my opinion of this story? I usually love any story that involves vampires. However, this story really didn’t have anything that different to it that would make me Oooh and Aah about it. There was no love triangle or for that matter a love affair. We do see Alyssa begin to fall for her maker, Lysander. They do have sex together… but aside from learning, what it would be like to experience vampirism first hand it was an okay start to a series. I am interested in reading the rest of the series. I feel there is great potential for Alyssa and this first book has laid a good foundation to springboard into the next book of a series. I would love to see what kind of a person Alyssa turns out to be.

This book was an awesome start to what I hope to be an excellent series. It definitely is worth the read. Let’s hit me with your next book, Ms Salidas.

You can find the link to Katie Salidas' web site in the left sidebar.