BLOODSUCKING FIENDS

A doggedly hip tale of vampire love in modern-day San Francisco, from the author of Practical Demonkeeping (1992) and Coyote Blue (1994). Gorgeous 26-year-old Transamerica claims clerk Jody (inexplicably never given a surname) is habitually unlucky in love until the night she's attacked by a vampire on her way home from work. Two days later, when she wakes up under a Dumpster near her office, the young woman's senses are heightened, she can't stand sunlight, she craves human blood: In short, Jody is now a vampire. Enter former midwesterner C. Thomas Flood, an aspiring writer by day and a supermarket stock-boy by night. Jody needs a human to help her both find and neutralize the bad-guy vampire (who's now at large), as well as solve the mystery of why she's been chosen to live for all eternity. And Tommy, who's struck by her beauty and vampirish panache, is an all-too-willing victim. As Jody and Tommy struggle togetherunder cover of darknessto learn the secrets of vampire life, they fall in love, of course, and suffer all the routine problems inherent in interspecies romance, including wildly divergent eating and sleeping habits, immortality, and murder. But with the help of a wise homeless man known throughout the city as the Emperor (a variation on Robin Williams's character in The Fisher King) and ``The Animals,'' Tommy's low-IQ'd band of Safeway employees, not too much blood is shed before the inevitable finale allows Jody and Tommy to be together...forever. There's still a shred of lifeblood here, but Moore never does sink his fangs into the story, which remains, for the most part, rather pallid.