I'm not entirely sure when I picked up this book and its first sequel from the author at a convention. I'm pretty sure it was one of the Phoenix Comicon Fan Fests in Glendale, because I vaguely remember her table being somewhere in the University of Phoenix Stadium, on that unforgiving concrete floor, so that means 2014 or 2015.

At that point, she'd written nine novellas in this series, plus a trilogy of others called 'A Falling Starr'. Since then, it looks like she's written a lot more, mostly YA novellas in an array of series and genres: a sci-fi trilogy called 'Sanshlian', the 'Wonderland' quartet and 'City of Kaus', an LGBTQ+ sci-fi western duology. At novel length, there's an urban fantasy quartet called 'Daughters of Hades', and there's more at a shorter length. She has clearly kept herself busy.

And, while this does feel like early work, it's also enjoyable stuff that shows a heck of a lot of promise and I'm not surprised that she's been able to build on them with so much more work. It was the cover art by Daniel Somerville that grabbed me first, painted in dark watercolours, and the concept finalised the deal because it's right up my alley. It's a collection of the first four novellas in this series, each titled for and revolving around a breed vampire that isn't the one you expect, even with one story set in Romania.

The four are listed on the back cover, each accompanied by a brief synopsis, and it was telling that I didn't recognise all of them. Being British, I knew about the baobhan sith (pronounced banshee) and the strigoi come up a lot. As a big fan of hopping vampires in Asian cinema, I was ecstatic to see a jiangshi included, but I didn't recognise a hooh-strah-dooh. What I found is that it's a Native American form of vampire, tied here to a single tribe, the Wyandot.

That's an odd synchronicity for me, given that my genealogical work on the family that I married into show that my kids have Wyandot ancestry eleven generations back, Jane Sandusky the daughter of Chief Steven Sandusky and "Wyandot Maiden". I chose to say that here because there's another odd synchronicity in play too. While I don't believe I have seen Dani Hoots's name since I bought these two books from her maybe seven or eight years ago, but suddenly it's showing up everywhere. That's a good thing, right?

Hooh-Strah-Dooh comes first and it sets the template in place, because the worst thing about the book is that the first three novellas have a very similar sweep, even though they're told in different ways otherwise. Each of them unfolds in the first person and is recounted by a vampire who has lived until the present day and is kind of pissed at how modern media presents vampires as romantic creatures. Each of these vampires was turned against their will and wants to cease to be. That's a lot of consistent pessimism, so it's refreshing when the fourth story changes that up completely.

The other trend is that each story becomes shorter, to the degree that the first surely has to be a novella but the last only a short story and the two in between of a length I couldn't be sure is a novella or a novelette. That's fine, of course, but the presentation of stories in an order where they get progressively less substantial is a surprising one and not a choice I'd have made, especially as these stories could be read in any order. I assume that they're chronological by original release.

Given that some of that is negative, I'll get the rest out of the way quickly. The prose is initially clumsy, though I got quickly sucked into the story anyway, by which point it did pick up. I've read a lot worse, from professional authors, but it's clear that Dani Hoots was learning her trade and I'm not going to hold a few clumsy paragraphs, or indeed a few badly proofed typos, against her. This stands on her imagination and her idea, and both are good.

The rest is positive. I liked the variety in the vampire mythologies, even if three ended up in a similar mindset; the Wyandot concept of the vampire was something new to me and I appreciated that a great deal. I also liked the variety of times and places in which the stories were set. Hooh-Strah-Dooh begins in Boston in 1931 and is centered around an Irish gang leader. Baobhan Sith follows an English army captain heading south with the remnants of his company after Culloden. Strigoi is set in 16^th-century Romania and Jiangshi in San Francisco during the California Gold Rush.

And, even if I was turned off by the consistency in opinion of these vampires, I liked the variety in tones that got them to that point. Hooh-Strah-Dooh is emphatically gothic in nature, a sort of 'Beauty and the Beast'-esque romance with a benefactor who takes a servant who he eventually frees, only to discover that she won't leave. The guilt is hard and strong in this one, across characters, and that leads to tragic bitterness. Baobhan Sith has a very different tragedy and the focus is on responsibility rather than guilt. In Strigoi, everything feeds off power, almost the entire story under a hypnotic spell that was woven by a seductive violin. Jiangshi returns to guilt, but explores it in a different fashion, driven by betrayal.

I enjoyed this a great deal and fully plan to follow up with book two. That one takes an even deeper dive into the realm of vampire lore across the world, its four stories also given titles for their respective vampires, this time more obscure names: Asanbosam, Lilith, Peuchen and Aufhocker. Excepting Lilith, I have no idea what those are and I'm eager to find out. And yes, if you're paying attention, you'll remember that I said that there were nine original novellas, meaning that there's one more not currently swept up into a collection, and that's Soucouyant, another new one on me.

I'm hoping to see Dani Hoots at another convention at some point, so I can purchase her other books. While YA is hardly my go-to reading level, I'm intrigued by a few series with her name on them and the rest of them ought to work well  for either my better half or my eldest granddaughter. I want to know more about what her imagination conjures up and I want to see her mature as a writer. ~~ Hal C F Astell