**Visit Dark Faerie Tales today for her Spooky Legends Guest blog with Cat Adams and a chance to win SIREN SONG**

---

I’m go glad that Amanda Marrone agreed to be part of Spooky Legends and I’m even more stoked that she picked my favorite character, washed up former child star turned wannabe vampire slayer, Kikki Crusher, from her new book SLAYED to tell us about “The Choking Doberman” urban legend. And to complete the good news for today, Amanda is giving away a copy of SLAYED. See details below.

Amanda Marrone grew up on Long Island where she spent her time reading, drawing, watching insects, and suffering from an overactive imagination. She earned a BA in education at SUNY Cortland and taught fifth and sixth grade in New Hampshire. She now lives in Connecticut with her husband, Joe, and their two kids.

---

Kiki Crusher on “The Choking Doberman”
Or why dating on the supernatural side can be dangerous.

by
Amanda Marrone

I thought I knew what scary was. After all, I’m a former child star who was kicked out of my parents’ kiddie rock band The Disco Unicorns because I was a little chubby. Okay, I was fat, but still—my parents were the lead singers and I was only five! Talk about a crushing blow to a kid’s delicate psyche.

But fast forward through years of debauchery and plastic surgery bankrolled by my trust fund, and then Daphne Van Helsing walks into my life. Actually it was a pub near my summer cottage, but yeah, she’s one of those Van Helsings. Daphne ended up helping me to my car because I’d had a little too much to drink, and we find this vampire noshing on my bodyguard’s neck in the parking lot. Without breaking a sweat, Daphne staked the sucker and cut off its head. (Yeah, I know. Cutting the head off a vamp you’ve already staked? Can you say redundant?)

Anyway, I’d been feeling pretty lost the last few years trying to figure out what to do with my life and I thought what could be better than hot chicks slaying vampires? I wanted in!

I’m not above blackmail and I had to use it to get Daphne to agree to teach me how to slay vampires. I had boasted to her that I had a strong stomach, but nothing could’ve prepared me for what we found on our first night on the prowl—a disemboweled body at the edge of the woods in the park. Talk about a horror movie. It looked an alien baby had burst from the dead guy’s stomach and then turned around and gone back to dine on the intestines, before gnawing off all the fingers and toes for desert!

I was a little disturbed by this find—okay, peeing in my pants terrified. Daphne said the M.O. was all wrong for a vampire. I suggested werewolf, but Daphne said it was unlikely since they take medication to keep from undergoing the change. (Apparently my fantasy of getting hot wolf action from the alpha male who battled his pack so we could consummate our undying love in supernatural bliss was never going to happen.) She did admit that it was possible someone could have skipped their meds and gone for a midnight snack.

Daphne calls in to report the body, and trying to sound braver than I felt, I joked about the legend of the choking Doberman. Daphne, who had basically been living in a cave—aka with her parents in a van—had never heard about the woman who came home to find her Doberman choking. The woman rushed the dog to the vet and was told to go home while they performed a tracheotomy on the poor pooch. Only when she gets home the phone is ringing and it’s the vet. “Get out of the house! Now!” the guy yells. “I found three fingers in your dog’s throat!”

The woman books it out of her house and the cops find a big, burly guy passed out in her closet bleeding from where his missing digits were ripped off by the dog.

Daphne said finding a burglar would be way better than finding a vampire in your closet. Jaded much?

We head back to the pub since I can’t hide the fact that I’m shaking and just my luck, cute guys are there! Daphne’s all shy since she’s never even held hands with a guy, (How sad is that?) but I know my way around men and the blonde with the sea green eyes is so too much to resist. So we’re throwing back shots and having a great time and then he starts to gag. Actual foam pours from his mouth and he runs from the pub. I follow him out to see if he needs someone to hold his hair back and get to his side just as he’s puking onto the street. Stomach bile rises in my own throat as I get a gander at the toes and bits of fingers lying in the steaming pile on the pavement.

My scream echoes in the cold night air as he snarls and his body changes. He looks back at me with large yellow eyes and then the huge black cat leaps off into the night with an angry growl.

Daphne was right—a robber getting is fingers bitten off is way better than what else might be out there, and we’ve made a pack to never date vampires, werewolves or cannibalistic shape shifters. Give me a human boy any time.

---

Thanks for visiting Amanda.  Come back anytime!

Visit Amanda Online:
Website|Blog|MySpace

Want to read more from Amanda Marrone?

Uninvited
Revealers
Devoured
Slayed (read Review)

Giveaway

Giveaway courtesy of Amanda Marrone
One copy of SLAYED by Amanda Marrone

The Van Helsing family has been hunting vampires for over one hundred years, but sixteen-year-old Daphne wishes her parents would take up an occupation that doesn’t involve decapitating vamps for cash. All Daphne wants is to settle down in one place, attend an actual school, and finally find a BFF to go to the mall with. Instead, Daphne has resigned herself to a life of fast food, cheap motels and buying garlic in bulk.

But when the Van Helsings are called to a coastal town in Maine, Daphne’s world is turned upside down. Not only do the Van Helsings find themselves hunting a terrifying new kind of vampire (one without fangs but with a taste for kindergarten cuisine), Daphne meets her first potential BF! The hitch? Her new crush is none other than Tyler Harker, AKA, the son of the rival slayer family.

What's a teen vampire slayer to do?

Click HERE to read an excerpt from SLAYED

Giveaway Guidelines

1. Open to US only
2. Fill out the form
3. Enter by November 6th. All Spooky Legend winners will be announced on November 7th

I would greatly appreciate if you shared this giveaway on your blog or favorite social networks.  And please tell Amanda what you think about “The Choking Doberman” in the comments. Thanks!

---

Interested in guest blogging on All Things Urban Fantasy? CONTACT ME

*This title will be released on October 5, 2010*

Title: Slayed
Author: Amanda Marrone
Series: Stand alone
Cover Art: N/A

Reading level: Young Adult
Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Simon Pulse 10/5/2010
ISBN-10: 1416994874
ISBN-13: 978-1416994879

Review Copy Source: Simon & Schuster
Reviewed by: Abigail

 

Book Description

The Van Helsing family has been hunting vampires for over one hundred years, but sixteen-year-old Daphne wishes her parents would take up an occupation that doesn’t involve decapitating vamps for cash. All Daphne wants is to settle down in one place, attend an actual school, and finally find a BFF to go to the mall with. Instead, Daphne has resigned herself to a life of fast food, cheap motels and buying garlic in bulk.

But when the Van Helsings are called to a coastal town in Maine, Daphne’s world is turned upside down. Not only do the Van Helsings find themselves hunting a terrifying new kind of vampire (one without fangs but with a taste for kindergarten cuisine), Daphne meets her first potential BF! The hitch? Her new crush is none other than Tyler Harker, AKA, the son of the rival slayer family.

What's a teen vampire slayer to do?

 Review

SLAYED is a little like what Buffy might have been (with a Romeo & Juliet twist) if she’d partnered up with Cordelia and had to teach her the vampire slaying ropes.  There is shallow fun dialogue, a somewhat campy foe, and a forbidden romance that you root for from the start. 

This is an example of a great premise (the teenage descendants of the two most famous vampire hunters: Van Helsing and Harker, meeting up and falling for each other despite their feuding families) that turned out to be a good book. 

The characters were all very believable and pitiable in their own way. Daphne as the bitter slayer whose parents don’t seem to care about the danger they constantly put her in or the truly cloistered life she’s had to live.  Then there’s Kiki, the washed up former child star whose parents kicked off the family TV show when she put on weight at the age of five.  And finally Tyler, the slayer who has been living in a car with his disturbed father ever since his mother got turned and had to be staked. 

Everyone is a mess, but in a can’t-look-away-car-crash-on-the-side-of-the-road way.  Daphne cuts out magazine pictures of the friends she imagines having (and the prom date she fantasizes about getting to second base with), Kiki is a plastic surgery addict with serious promiscuity issues, and Tyler is barely hanging on to his father’s sanity. 

Compared to the more thoughtful character development early on, the ending of SLAYED felt pretty rushed and much too easy.  Another fifty pages would have gone a long way towards smoothing out some of the convenient plot developments and jumpy action sequences (not to mention the much too perfect epilogue).  But the feuding vampire slayer dynasties and fascinatingly damaged characters make SLAYED a fun, if flawed, read.  I believe this is a stand alone story (although there is ample opportunity for a sequel, so you never know), but Amanda Marrone has several other Paranormal YA’s under her belt that I plan on picking up.

Sexual Content: References to sex. References to homosexuality. A scene of mild sensuality.

My Rating:

3/5
Good - A fun read with minor flaws. Maybe read an excerpt before buying.

Click HERE to read an excerpt from SLAYED

Previous books in the series:

1. N/A

Also reviewed by:

•  Confessions of the Un-Published