#ReadIndie Book Review: The Human Cure by Tracy Auerbach

Synopsis:

Kate Plesser is leading a dead-end life as an office assistant with a penchant for bad relationships. She is lost. When Kate is kidnapped by Hunter, a gorgeous stranger, she assumes he is just some sick psychopath. She never suspects he is actually a vampire, and that she is about to be plunged into a world stranger than her wildest dreams. In the underground city where Hunter lives, she encounters his otherworldly cousin Chase, who holds the key to her freedom. She is thrust into a village where humans are farmed for feeding and breeding. In this mysterious new world beneath Queens, New York, Kate finds something she never expected.

Why? Why does he want me to know how to raise a baby vampire? Oh my God, he is going to breed little demon spawn with me. I have to get out.

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What can I say about The Human Cure? It was a fun read but not really what I expected. I went into this expecting a horror story and I never got it. Instead I got nice slow romance with some supernatural complications thrown in.

Picture this: a small town frozen in time somewhere in the nineteenth or twentieth century. Now put that town deep underground and you have the setting of The Human Cure. Here people were farmed like livestock for the consumption of their vampire masters, the Bardock family. However, these humans are not only a food source but also act as breeding machines for the Bardocks to expand their family every breeding cycle.

The Human Cure begins when the head of the family demands that his son, Hunter, produce offspring. Hunter, the only of Bardock’s sons not to embrace his vampiric nature, is then forced to breed and unfortunately, he chose Kate. She is then kidnapped after a one night stand and brought to the village where she is left in the care of Hunter’s mysterious cousin, Chase.

The story unfolds in alternating perspectives between Kate and Chase and I know from that alone it already sounds like a typical vampire romance but it really isn’t. For starters, Kate had spunk. She resisted her situation until she couldn’t anymore and even then she never completely gave in to it. Chase, on the other hand, was a real creature of the night that was ruled by his hunger. In fact, he had mentioned on several occasions that he had no problems feeding on Kate if she weren’t his cousin’s property. Everything about Chase was also so cut and dry that I couldn’t help but snicker because he was #relatable.

“Chase was disgusted that he had somehow stumbled into a conversation with a human.”

There was also an element of originality to the vampires that I kind of liked but also really confused me. And I can’t really say more than that without spoiling the plot which is a little irritating.

I did have a couple issues with this story and they mostly stem from the fact that it was so short. Even though I specifically chose to read THC because it was short, it worked against me in the end. I was very interested in the underground village and would have liked for it to be built upon a lot more. The flow of the story was also disjointed because there were times when we just jumped from scene to scene. I also would have loved to get more background into the main trio ─ Kate, Chase, and Hunter. And lastly, I would have loved to see more of the Bardock’s ruthlessness. We get a taste of their darkness in Chase’s POV but I just wanted more. My other main issue was that the main plotline didn’t really feel very major. I honestly considered skimming it (realistically it was like twenty pages or something) and it turned out to have a really weird resolution.

Long story short, The Human Cure has potential and I really hope that Auerbach revisits this world and idea in the future. Whether we get some sort of side story or a complete fleshed out revision to add some more depth to the idea and plot, I don’t really care. The story just doesn’t feel complete to me.