The quickest way to Willow Rose Briar’s heart is probably through somebody else’s rib cage. She is, after all, an immensely talented occult pathologist/witch who collects hyoids and can discuss disembowelment with the kind of enthusiasm that most people would reserve for a juicy bit of gossip. Her idea of small talk probably isn’t going to win her many second dates, but if she can find a man who considers that charming, you’ve got the makings of a very weird fairy tale.
Wendy Heiss has written one in her gothic fantasy “Mortdale: Anatomy of a Vampire’s Heart,” though her idea of happily ever after involves considerably more entrails and threats of bodily harm than Cinderella had to contend with. I adored Heiss’ wonderfully peculiar heroine, her besotted vampire husband, and their collection of gothic misfit friends and familiars. I just had a considerably less wonderful time figuring out what the hell was happening in the entire plot around them.
For 500 years, the witches of Meridian and the vampires of Mortdale have begrudgingly observed a pact that requires a witch to marry a vampire every summer solstice and a vampire to be sacrificed to protect the witches from an ancient curse. Now, the brides are mysteriously dying, and Willow, feared and mistreated by her coven, is tasked with marrying the formidable (and luckily for her, very attractive) Lord Logan Duncan and finding out why. Logan, the king’s second-in-command, is meanwhile dealing with a mysterious madness spreading among vampires — and now trying to determine what his strange new wife is hiding. Oh, and there’s also enough bad blood among the witches, vampires, and humans to keep things interesting.
But the best part of the book is watching two people discover just how well their particular brands of weird fit together. Logan is powerful, intimidating, and accustomed to being obeyed; somewhere along the way, the quirky Willow missed the lesson on shutting up around dangerous men. She’s morbid, brilliant, weird, far too comfortable with corpses, and armed with a tongue sharp enough to perform her own autopsies. But there’s also an enormous amount of tenderness beneath all that enthusiasm for dismemberment; her loyalty to the people she loves is far stronger than her instinct for self-preservation. She has a very big heart for someone so fascinated by taking out other people’s.
Naturally, I loved her.
A match made in a morgue
Fortunately, Logan does, too. (Even if he’s a little slower on the uptake.)
Logan has all the credentials of a proper monster: He’s scarred and powerful, and he has both a formidable reputation and a talent for intimidation. And then Willow arrives… and his vampire dignity proves no match for a woman who talks about dissecting people as though she’s suggesting a particularly delightful way to spend an afternoon. I’m betting Dracula might be appalled by what’s become of the modern vampire; centuries after he cultivated a reputation for terror and seduction, his literary successors have turned into hopelessly lovesick idiots. And I eat it up every time.
Heiss has made their attraction wonderfully ridiculous and genuinely moving — full of longing glances, combustible tension, wicked banter, possessive declarations, and a mutual appetite for each other that occasionally sounds like a threat to actually follow through on it. (“I could just eat you up” takes on an entirely new meaning when the person saying that has fangs.) I’d never considered a morgue particularly conducive to romance, but Heiss makes a surprisingly compelling argument in its favor. Willow and Logan’s chemistry is ferocious, but so is their tenderness. He falls for Willow because of her oddities, not in spite of them; he never ever wishes she’d be quieter or more normal. There’s truly something just so satisfying about watching a woman who has been made to feel like a monster for her whole life discover that, oh, hey, she’s actually someone’s favorite person.
The rest of Mortdale’s household is terrific company, too, and gives Willow something her coven never did: people who want her to stay. There’s Piper, Logan’s young niece; Logan’s guards and best friends, Henry and Arthur, who are frequently forced to endure their employers’ antics (and now his wife’s, too); and Thomas, Willow’s rat familiar, whose interest in eating children is met with a slightly alarming degree of indulgence. Heiss has a marvelous feel for placing ordinary affection alongside blood-soaked gothic horror.
Mortdale is a kingdom of monstrous appetites, ancient grudges, dark magic, and the ever-present possibility of finding yourself on the wrong end of someone’s fangs. But inside Logan’s household, all that doom and gloom (and gore) coexist with teasing, bickering, ridiculous conversations, and people who genuinely care about one another. The monsters turn out to be rather good at making a home.
But Willow’s characterization requires a small leap of faith. Don’t get me wrong, I loved every gloriously inappropriate thing that came out of her mouth and her delightfully oddball approach to just about everything. But the woman we first meet is a frightening, isolated pathologist who is constantly mistreated by her coven and who has a reputation that inspires genuine fear. She’s also apparently the coven leader’s trusted adviser, which was news to me, and probably her, too. And then, almost immediately after Willow meets Logan, she becomes a relentlessly sunshine-y, exuberantly unhinged chatterbox. I loved that cheerfully peculiar Willow who appeared in the kingdom of Mortdale much more, but her transition was so abrupt that I wondered whether her personality had changed in the carriage on the way to her wedding.
Death by a thousand plot points
Mortdale’s vampires might be losing their minds, and I sympathize. Twenty-four pages into the book, I was already struggling to keep track of who was doing what to whom, much less why, and every explanation seemed to arrive with a fresh set of qualifications. There are curses and the Maddening, witchy grudges, church intrigues, an undead army, and enough centuries-old scheming to keep several supernatural crime units employed indefinitely. The feeling that I missed a chapter (or three) became a recurring theme. Scenes and discoveries seemed to skip over the connective tissue that would explain how the characters had arrived at their latest and greatest predicament.
Most murder mysteries leave you wondering who did it. “Mortdale” leaves you wondering what the villain didn’t do. Murder? Check. Curses? Naturally. Centuries of political manipulation and an elaborate plan to conquer several kingdoms? Of course. I collected clues, reread passages, seriously considered making a flowchart, and tried to work out what rules applied to whom. What I got in return was usually another complicated “revelation” that required another explanation; the machinery behind the conspiracies grew increasingly elaborate without growing increasingly more clear. The culprit is hardly difficult to spot, which makes the complexity of their schemes even more baffling. How can the answer to who be so obvious when the answers to how and why remain so elusive?
Heiss is terrific at writing people, particularly people falling in love, but she’s considerably less successful at constructing the complicated story around them. Her characters’ feelings and motivations make sense even when their investigations don’t. And after watching her handle the emotional developments with such care, I wanted the actual events to fit together just as convincingly.
What makes those myriad issues so dang frustrating is how much Heiss otherwise gets right. I loved her strange, beautiful, gruesome story; her willingness to let the romance be both filthy and sweet; her loveable monsters; and the way she developed characters who have spent so long feeling unwanted. I was thrilled for Willow and Logan by the time they got their fairytale ending, even as I remained fuzzy on the mechanics that brought me there. There’s a beating heart inside “Mortdale,” all right. I just wish the rest of its anatomy had a little more connective tissue.
