Awakening (Darklight book 1) by Sean Ian O'Meidhir and Connal Braginsky

[Ulysses]

Awakening (Darklight book 1)
By Sean Ian O'Meidhir & Connal Braginsky
Ninestar Press, 2020
Five stars

You had me at gay autistic vampire.

Nathen Hale (did the irony of this name register?) is a computer genius, and also (as he’s just discovered) on the spectrum. The surprise is, sitting in this anonymous corporate conference room, that he is also apparently a vampire. And he doesn’t know how that happened.

Nathen assumed that this was a world without either magic or monsters, and was content to live a quiet, if lonely, life with his mother in Marin County in their family’s Victorian mansion. Apparently, the healthcare benefits offered by this corporation were attractive, given that his mother’s treatment for MS was going to be costly and longterm. The rest, however, is a little fuzzy.

Nathen’s new employer is very concerned about a cyber-terrorist group that calls themselves the Sons of Discord, who have infected the software systems in a San Francisco children’s hospital and demanded a ransom. Dealing with this is part of his job, his skills as a cyber-hacker heightened by his new vampiric powers.

Then Nathen gets a message from his longtime online friend Syn, who is also very concerned about the Sons of Discord and their attack on the hospital. Still vague about his new powers, he breaks protocol and goes to her apartment for a gathering intended to discuss this problem and consider how to help. There he meets Cameron Corazon, a tall redhead with magical powers the likes of which Nathen has never imagined.

What I loved about this book is that the plot is important, and while the instant and unexpected connection between Nathen and Cameron goes beyond mere attraction, the crisis they are trying to avert at the children’s hospital remains front and center.

There’s a weird Hitchcockian darkness to the plot, leavened by the rom-com goofiness of Nathen’s autistic perception of everything around him. Nathen doesn’t worry about how others see the world—only about how HE sees the world around him. Cameron, however, is an enormous distraction, and both of these young men quickly begin to understand that their connection is something nobody—cyber terrorists or sinister corporate suits—anticipated.

My favorite line toward the end is “It probably doesn’t matter,” voiced by Cameron. Rather than a cliffhanger, the authors cleverly drop this line into a casual conversation, just before the reader finds out that, after all, this is only the first book in a series.

I’ve bought the whole series because it is such a fascinating and fun take on vampires, while also being a high-tension adventure and a great gay romance. Boom.