Fledgling

I usually read only vampire novels by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Charlaine Harris and Tanya Huff but I thought I'd try Fledgling, another vampire novel by Octavia E. Butler, the winner of two Hugos and a Nebula and the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. It deals with a race of vampires called the Ina. They may either have co-evolved with humans or are descendents of aliens--they themselves don't know. They are definitely not the demonic, undead Whedonverse vampires we know and love. Each Ina has a "family" of human symbionts from which they feed. It was a nice read but I think it might be the first book in a series so that it suffered from too much "set-upitis".
The other problem for me was that it was lacking something--graphic sex. I read it as a fanfiction reader of NC-17 fics and Butler had to be so very circumspect and PGish. I could picture a BtVS version where Spike was the vampire with Xander and Tara and Wesley and Fred and maybe WB Willow as his symbionts with lots of NC-17 action. I'm afraid BtVS fanfiction has spoiled professionally published vampire stories for me *sigh*