By Kazuko Furumiya
Tokyopop, 195 pp.
Rating: Teen (13+)

Kiyo starts out unlike a typical shojo heroine. She kicks in the front gate of the supposedly haunted house she inherits from her grandmother and declares she isn’t afraid of ghosts. While there are some squatters in the house, they are far from the uninvited house ghosts the lawyers expected—they turn out to be two vampires. One of them, Kuroboshi, winds up liking Kiyo’s “saucy” attitude when telling the pair to take a hike and decides to make Kiyo his vampire bride. Kiyo wants no part of this, and yet can’t help but like Kuroboshi and his vampire… servant/friend/hanger-on Alshu. She begins living with the pair and a slow, yet reluctant, romance blossoms.

Although Kiyo starts off as an atypical heroine, she quickly starts hitting all the stereotypes. She can’t cook. She doesn’t like the romantic advances of Kuroboshi, and always denies him his affection. She’s a poor girl that gets picked on at a school full of rich students. Kuroboshi is also a fairly typical brooding, mysterious bishounen with a dark past, few words, and a pretty constant stream of what seems like genuine affection for Kiyo. Of course, his affection involves sucking her blood, but after the first time, Kiyo admits it doesn’t hurt and rejects him for trying to claim her as his bride. He’s also insanely possessive and follows her around to work, school, et cetera. Kiyo continues to be rather resilient, insisting on working a job to support the small family and putting up with the bullying at school admirably, but unfortunately she isn’t quite developed enough and doesn’t have all that much of a personality. The most interesting character is actually Alshu, who is delightfully bizarre and manages to lighten the mood in unexpected ways when it threatened to get dark, but even he sometimes overstays his welcome as comic relief.

After the first story, where Kiyo and Kuroboshi have to save the house from being bulldozed by crooked lawyers, the series hits up the part-time job and school dance tropes to fill out the book. Though there are a few things I liked in the first story, the part-time job story that follows it is so horribly bland that I had trouble continuing. The school dance story isn’t much better, and it stumbles through a few terrible shojo plot devices before wrapping up, but I liked the way the romance developed in it well enough that I didn’t feel cheated when I finished the book. Impressively, vampirism proves to be an almost nonexistent plot point, only coming into play at the crisis point of each chapter when Kuroboshi has to drink Kiyo’s blood in order to use his powers to save the day. Otherwise, it doesn’t really make much of a difference that Kuroboshi and Alshu are vampires.

The art is confusing and doesn’t really help the weak plot out much. I sometimes had a hard time figuring out what was going on in action scenes, and there’s also a terrible sense of place. The panel layouts and use of screentone also tend to muddy up the flow of the page.

The plot summary on the back promises an excellent ending for the series’ next volume, and I was taken in enough by the romance in the last chapter that I’ll likely pick up the next volume to see what the conclusion is, but otherwise I would have stopped at this volume. It’s just not particularly good. At all.

Volume one of Bloody Kiss is available now.