Straight Outta Fangton by C. T. Phipps

Quote of the Book

“I’m a millionaire,” Steve said “My great-great grandmother was Betty Crocker.”
“I’m pretty sure Betty Crocker wasn’t a werewolf,” I said “We’d have been able to taste the difference.”

Blurb

Peter Stone is a poor black vampire who is wondering where his nightclub, mansion, and sports car is. Instead, he is working a minimum wage job during the night shift as being a vampire isn’t all that impressive in a world where they’ve come out to mortals.

Exiled from the rich and powerful undead in New Detroit, he is forced to go back when someone dumps a newly-transformed vampire in the bathroom of his gas station’s store. This gets him fangs-deep in a plot of vampire hunters, supernatural revolutionaries, and a millennium-old French knight determined to wipe out the supernatural.

Sometimes, it just doesn’t pay to get out of the coffin.

Personal notes

Review request from author. Thank you to C.T. Phipps, for generously providing a copy in exchange for a review.

Song of the Book

This book called for a catchy fun vampire song. Surprisingly, there are quite a few.

Review

This was very entertaining. I kind of knew what to expect from this after having read I Was a Teenage Weredeer and wasn’t disappointed in the quality. There is no doubt in Phipp’s skill in balancing comedy with a surprisingly more complicated world and plot than you’d expect from a fun popcorn read.

Peter Stone’s boring and leads a rather less classy life than he expected. Being made a vamp is about to get exciting, when he comes across a young woman (Melissa) that has been newly turned in the washroom of the gas station where he works.

There are quite a few policies to do with turning humans to Vampires so this unregistered find is a bit of a problem and needs to brought before the elder, kicking off the uncovering of a scheme to change the power structure of the Vampire Nation and efforts to stop it.

From start to finish this book was full of action, some gore (it is a vampire book after all) witty dialogue, every bit of vampire lore and pop culture you can think of and some really fun characters. I particularly enjoyed Peter and David’s relationship and I have to appreciate that with a cast this large, I didn’t have one issue telling the characters apart, which for me is a big deal.

A huge amount of credit goes to the narrator Cary Hite for his highly entertaining portrayal of Peter and the rest of the characters.  I laughed out loud a few times and with a book that has this much dialogue and witty comebacks between characters, it would have been easy to have everyone start sounding the same after a while. While some of this is credit to the author for keeping his characters clear and distinctive from one another, I never once had an issue telling who was who during the audio (even when a character went off-screen and came back later on in the story) and also considering he’s a dude, he even managed to make the women sound a bit different while staying out of that ‘nagging wife voice’ that you sometimes get when men read women characters.

I think I enjoyed this one even more than I Was a Teenage Weredeer, although that might have more to do with the audio. Listening to conversation heavy stories over reading them is definitely more fun, especially when you have such a talented reader.

This review was written by Jennifer (BunnyReads)

Other reviews of C. T. Phipps’ books:

I Was a Teenage Weredeer review by Timy

I Was a Teenage Weredeer review by Jen

An American Weredeer in Michigan review by Timy