The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant

Note: This review is for the book version by Drew Hayes, not the audiobook version.

I was a tiny bit worried this book would be flooded with self-depreciation and/or just teasing a lot of actually interesting events, but it's hilarious.

At the start of the book Fred is a quiet, bookish, sweater-vest-wearing (vampire) accountant who decides to not only go to his 10-year high school, but to Be Spontaneous while there. He even books the hotel for 4 days, and carefully packs 4 clean changes of clothing, plus 4 days worth of blood, to give himself ample room for Spontaneity.

By the end of the book he's got an eclectic group of friends and they get together regularly to drink their beverages of choice (wine, beer, and soda), and play non-scored Scrabble. (It's not specified that it's non-scored, but with him playing words like "periodontist" and the other two thinking carefully before playing short, 4-letter words, there's clearly no point.)

The world building is excellent, and more than once what looked like a humorous throwaway line actually comes back to be an important plot element. There's not a lot of wasted text or events, but it all flows very smoothly. I laughed a lot, and quoted a lot of lines at my spouse, and already have the sequel on my to-buy list.

My only quibble is that it sometimes I think the author is stretching their vocabulary too far. There's a few phrases such as "he was donned in armor" where you can get the meaning, but it's the totally wrong word, and it makes you wonder whether it was caused by overly-generous thesaurus use, or a re-phrased sentence that didn't get copy-edited correctly.

You will eventually discover that under the movie stereotypes, imposed mystique, and overall inflated expectations, each and every one of us is at least a touch more boring than our images would indicate.
And that is not a bad thing.

This was a quick and pretty fun read. I didn't enjoy it as much as I enjoyed all the other books by Drew Hayes that I've read—the epic Super Powereds saga that I followed religiously as a webserial, and NPCs, my favorite "it's like D&D but in book form" novel. I did enjoy it quite a bit, though. It's a classic "ordinary guy stuck in the middle of extraordinary things" tale, or rather, a collection of short stories with a loosely overarching narrative. The worldbuilding is fun and quirky. The characters don't seem to be very memorable to me, but they were fun enough to hang around with. I wish each story didn't start with a recap of the previous one, though. I haven't checked, but I suspect that maybe the author first published this online in an episodic format and that's why the recaps were necessary. But I think it could have been a good idea to edit them out when transferring the story to book format.

Read for the following October 2020 readathons:
- Spooks and Tea: Paranormal Creatures
- Gothic Readathon: Bloodsuckers
- Gothtober2020: Undead Characters