Series Review - Teeth: The Complete Meal by Chele Cooke
Greetings and welcome to Reviews That Burn: Series Reviews, part of Books That Burn. Series Reviews discuss at least three books in a series and cover the overarching themes and development of the story across several books. I'd like to thank longtime Patron Case Aiken, who receives a monthly shoutout, as well as returning patron Chris Alvarado.
Teeth: The Complete Meal by Chele Cooke
TEETH: The First Bite
Being dead just got complicated.
Spencer’s life began after his death. Being a vampire is better than any teen flick made it out to be. After all, what’s not to like? He’s stronger, faster, and deadlier than any predator. He has a job, a home, and he’ll be young and pretty forever.
When Thomas wakes up in the throes of transitioning, Spencer is assigned to train the newly sired vampire. He thinks it’ll be fun, but it could turn the afterlife upside down for everyone, even the people Spencer didn’t know existed.
Spencer is about to learn that the rules he has been abiding by since his death are all lies. And he must help Thomas adjust to his new life before they are turned from predator to prey.
PUBLISHER: Independently Published
LENGTH: ~800 pages across a trilogy and a short story collection
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy
RECOMMENDED: Highly
Queer Rep Summary: Gay/Achillean Main Character(s), Bi/Pan Main Character(s).
TITLES DISCUSSED
- TEETH: The First Bite (2014)
- MEAT: The Second Serving (2017)
- BLOOD: The Third Course (2018)
- TURN: Three Short Sirings (2018)
Minimal Spoiler Zone
Series Premise
The vampires in this city have a simple rule with bloody consequences: no sirings. In practice, this means that if a new vampire is sired, their sire is brutally killed to maintain the number of vampires. Thomas wakes up in his new undeath, trapped in a room with a woman being bled to death for having unwisely sired him. As the series continues, the picture is more complicated, as it turns out this rule exists as part of an agreement with other paranormal factions in the city: Vampires are not the only predators in town.
What starts out as a bloody exploration of this tangle of vampires living under a rule which restricts their numbers turns into a tale of monsters surprised by depravity, exploring themes of addiction, kidnapping, shades of killing, and the existence of lines best not crossed even within a space where cannibalism and murder are rote facets of existence.
Main Characters
Mostly a mix of vampires and werewolves, with one other type of magical people in play starting in the second book.
How Queer Is It?
Very queer, mostly in shades of bi/pan and achillean/gay. No one is in a particularly healthy relationship, but orientation has little to no correlation with how likely a romantic or sexual entanglement is to work out over the series. There are several queer characters, some do die, but this is not a "bury your gays" situation.
Here There Be Spoilers
Later Series Developments
TEETH: The First Bite ends with the surprising information that there are also werewolves in town. MEAT: The Second Serving follows those werewolves, showing their current situation and then shifting focus quite suddenly when one of them talks a vampire into helping a human member of the pack with kidnapping someone who might be able to help him become a werewolf like the rest of his family. The rest of the trilogy focuses on this kidnapping, its events and aftermath, and what happens when proud monsters have to deal with someone who breaks even their mores.
Character Twists
It turns out that being human while watching your family kill and eat humans every full moon might not be great for one's mental health. Everything starts going quite badly for the pack when the son of the alpha pair helps with a kidnapping to try and get information on how he could be fully werewolf like the rest of his family. This series has a distinction between those born werewolves and those who are turned with a bite, but since we don't actually meet any characters in the second situation I don't have much to go off of except that this is not an acceptable outcome for the character in question.
Themes
Major themes include violence, death, addiction, monstrosity, and abuse.
Flow
The first book is restricted to vampires and the events around Thomas's turning until the final chapter or so when it's revealed that there are werewolves and as-yet-unnamed other magical factions in the city. The second book is from the perspective of some of the werewolves, but since they all knew about the vampires there's no surprise or attempt to hide the information. This engenders a feeling in the reader of the world expanding and the lore getting deeper, just by moving to narrators who have fewer (or at least different) secrets in play. By the third book, anyone could be a narrator, irrespective of their supernatural type, and the story is about the entanglements and clashes between individuals within the factions, as things have gotten far more complicated and personal loyalties conflict with group goals.
Narrator(s)
Over the course of the trilogy there's a mix of vampires and werewolves as narrators. The whole series is in third person, but with the thoughts of one character at a time available to the reader. Notable characters include Thomas (the newly-turned vampire), August, William, and Spencer (established vampires), Carson and Priya (werewolves), Paige, and Edeline.
Twists and Turns
Beyond just werewolves and vampires, there's a third group with heritable magic. One of them has the ability to read minds, and she is kidnapped for information by a vampire, a werewolf, and the human son of the werewolf alphas. The vampire is manipulated until he thinks it's his idea to use her to get high (he was an addict as a human, and the way the need to feed is close cousins with addiction hasn't helped him get over that tendency once he was turned).
A theme common to most books with vampires or werewolves is the idea of cannibalism, and to what degree the supernatural characters view humans as something separate from themselves. Usually, some vampires kill humans, the protagonist and any vampires aligned with them try not to kill humans, and werewolves (or other shifters) consider it a terrible thing to take a human life. Not so in TEETH: THE COMPLETE MEAL. Vampires and werewolves alike are killers of humans, stalking their prey and consuming them. Werewolves dislike vampires because they are predators in their territory, competing against them for humans in a world where the humans try to keep track of murders and disappearances, and a dogged investigation could mean exposure and conflict. They are killers in a territory dispute, not pretenders to any kind of moral high ground based on their eating habits. Early in the second book there are mentions of past werewolves who have had to be killed for the endangering existence of the pack. Once werewolves begin killing in human form they are treated as monsters, having exited the bounds of what is acceptable to other werewolves. This detail helped solidify how the werewolves (and vampires) have their own sense of right and wrong, or at least rules they live by in order to enable their continued existence and the humans' ignorance of the same.
Probably the biggest twist for me was when the human son of the werewolves takes the lead in the kidnapping crew, making it clear that the excuse of finding a way for him to become a werewolf was more than an excuse to him, but a burning desire for which he will throw away anything or anyone who tries to stop him. Once he is turned, he's so bloodthirsty that he kills in human form, and when he's a wolf he kills without regard for eating afterwards. Even though it's previously been established that killing humans in human form is the kind of thing that werewolves take seriously, his parents insist that he must not have killed them, believing his story without a deeper examination. Werewolves kill for food at the full moon, but he is killing for a mixture of sport, boredom, and malicious contempt for those who are merely human. Most other werewolves and vampires treat humans as a mixture of prey and potentially dangerous enemies, taking care to keep their own supernatural existence hidden from the authorities so that the wrath of the human city doesn't come down upon them. The alpha's son has no caution or respect. None for humans, not vampires, and not even his fellow werewolves. His monstrous actions are along a continuum of acceptable werewolf behavior, but if any other werewolf had started killing humans outside the full moon hunts then they would have been killed as a danger to the other werewolves. We know this because that is what happened to Priya's parents before she was adopted into this pack. They were killing humans while still in human form, and were killed by the other werewolves for it. But, now that it's their own son who they thought would never be able to transform and be part of the pack, the alphas reject the idea that anything could be wrong, and buy into the flimsiest justifications for his actions both during and outside of the hunt.
Addiction in particular is treated as something nuanced and something which ultimately doesn't have to ruin your life (or undeath), but it takes a long time before there's room for a more positive message amidst all the trauma (addiction-related or otherwise). One vampire's past addiction (to drugs in his mortal life) and his current vampiric need for blood are used against him by someone who knows his potential weakness and places him in a position where he's specifically vulnerable. From that point, everything he does (good and bad) is on him, and there's quite a lot of bad before he starts to turn around in the third book. Spencer spends several months feeding from Edeline, a mind-reader whose blood induces a form of high when consumed by a vampire like Spencer. Part of his recovery arc in the third book revolves around whether it's possible for him to make amends to her after kidnapping her and using her for her blood for months. By the end they've reached an equilibrium where they're able to both be part of the mixed vampire and werewolf group leaving town. While Spencer thinks what he did is unforgivable and irredeemable, not even Edeline thinks that there's no way back for him, and she's an active part of his road to recovery. His struggles with addiction are treated as struggles that don't have to indict or define him, leaving room for him to have fallen off the wagon, as it were, within the narrative but still have a positive existence going forward.
Current Status
The series is complete as a trilogy with an accompanying short story collection, telling a full story with a definite ending. I read the omnibus edition with all four volumes. If the author ever returned to that world it would be with a new narrative.
If you like this you may like:
- Blind Man's Wolf by Amelia Faulkner
- Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Major Series CWs: blood, addiction, violence, kidnapping, emotional abuse, cannibalism, murder, death.
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