Morgan Mansfield feels the moon’s pull, her family’s curse, brought on by a sinisterly manipulative alpha male by the name of Seth Toumbs. Where a Victorian villain of Seth’s nature would reside in a symbol of lordly power such as a castle or palace, Seth, a creature seemingly of the post modern age, resides in the place that symbolized power in the age most recently passed—a suburban country club. Significantly, unlike in the many popular TV crime dramas, the villains in The Bite are not from the underside of the economy, but from the top end.

Morgan Mansfield has a new friend, a creepy midwife named Mira who argues with what she cooks on the stove and drinks rosewater. The Bite is a metaphysical tale on multiple levels with Mira being the shamanic figure, essentially the mother of the subtext.

In this conclusion to her Love Bites trilogy, written at a refreshing pulp pace [which tends to impart pace to the narrative], Sheri Broadbent sketches the undercurrents of human society in terms of a gruesome form of transhumant sorcery which is closer to The Exorcist than Harry Potter. Her protagonist Morgan Mansfield is sexy enough to get herself in trouble, flawed enough to be a drunk, and defiant enough to challenge the deeper evils of the world.

I would describe the thematic sentence in this novella that best portrays its tone as “We are what we make of our lives, not what others try to make us into.”

This passage emerges from the beginning of the second quarter of the story just as the terrible nature of the man that has seduced her and her sister becomes more clearly apparent. In a sense Morgan Mansfield is a character destined to deconstruct Seth Toumbs for the reader, which is clearly apparent when you contrast him and his relationship with Morgan with that of his counterpart, Winston Garret, the liberal American supporting character in this tragedy about his own absence who lacks the masculine qualities that make Seth the force he is. Seth, who is tellingly British, with a keen sense of patrimony, is not rendered in the classic intense fashion of earlier horror such as Stoker’s Dracula, nor in the introspective fashion of Rice’s Interview With A Vampire, but with the demeanor of the disinterested villain more fitting to our own times.

I have read the first 82 pages of the 121 page manuscript, and am saving the conclusion for Halloween, an ending that is well worth getting to.

The last line I read seemed like a good point to assess the novella from the perspective I like to review fiction this length and longer, the point at which I am absolutely sure I want to finish it:

“The man’s already ugly face twisted with anger. His mouth turned to speak, only nothing but a garbled moan escaped his thin, waxy lips.”

God job Sheri—you managed to tickle my calloused creepy bone.