isn't just that Eugene does something new with vampire tropes (that in this case also involve the worlds of bio-tech and high finance) or that he provides a complex, touching portrait of a Mormon mother desperately trying to save her terminally ill child. It's that he weaves these elements together with well-deployed literary (often Biblical) allusions and quotations that add substance to the questions raised about belief, redemption, desire, sin and death.

The book is something entirely different [than how it's been promoted or described], an exploration of the human condition with an LDS background (though for all it mattered, it could have been any group, kindly treated), and one of the modern vampire types who are likeable characters, with souls . . . who just happen to have knowledge, power, wealth and angst.

Labels: angel falling softly, angel reviews, lds