The Bite Before Christmas

The Bite Before Christmas
Laura Baumbach
Loose Id
ISBN: 978-1-59632-372-8
Fiction, Paranormal Fantasy, Erotic Romance
Reviewed by Jean Roberta

Would vampires yearn for forgiveness, if they existed? Would the spiritual concept of salvation mean anything to immortal predators? Would they celebrate Christmas?
Meet Laura Baumbach's sensuous vampires, who live in a kind of fictional twilight zone between paranormal fantasy and male-on-male erotic romance. These guys are emotional enough to satisfy the most addicted romance readers: they love, lust and hate at a higher volume than do any mere mortals. In this sense, they have a certain traditional femininity that coexists with beefcake bodies and throbbing organs.
Sin and Salvation begins with the loneliness of centuries-old Ian Flynn as he watches snowflakes fall on Christmas Eve and thinks of his lover Trevor, who is far from him. The reader is told: "Even vampires had ghosts that haunted them and demons that needed excision. Dirty blood soothed Trevor's pain; snowflakes eased Ian's."
Trevor's Christmas ritual is to return to the mean streets of London, England, where he was robbed of his mortal life in the Victorian age. As a stage actor, Trevor had attracted a supernatural gentleman suitor, Ian, and aroused murderous envy in the young male hustlers who hung about the theatre. Unwilling to lose Trevor, Ian had broken his own rule not to "turn" an innocent mortal. Unwilling to forgive and forget, Trevor has returned to the scene of the crime again and again to hunt down "murderous riffraff and gang members."
Will Trevor's "seasonal mission" never end? Will Ian ever forgive himself for his part in it?
While respectable mortals celebrate the season, Trevor looks for trouble and finds it:
"In the light of the single bare bulb hanging from a warehouse iron rod twenty feet up the side of the building to his right, he could see four men entwined in a battle of fists and bats. The occasional glitter of metal shone in the dim light as arms and legs twisted around each other and under bodies so rapidly, Trevor wasn't sure who was battling whom."
Nor does he care. As Trevor bares his fangs and prepares to jump into the fray as an angel of death, he hears "a faint fluttering heartbeat that didn't belong to the group of men in front of him." At first, he ignores it.
What happens next changes Trevor's grim sense of mission and reminds him that Ian is both his lover and, in a sense, the only family he has left. After many years, Trevor
changes his mind about where he is meant to be on the most important night of the year.
Yum. The vampires in this story are delightfully human in a moral sense and delightfully superhuman in a sexual sense. The sex scenes are described in loving detail.
Although "erotic romance" follows certain patterns, by definition, this one is unusual enough to satisfy a reader's desire for novelty. Laura Baumbach has shown herself to be one of the queens of the male-on-male variety.