Vampire in Oxford
A Dark Supernatural Romance for Men (Shadowblood Chronicles, Book 1)
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Vampire in Oxford
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Narrated by:
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Rowan Wren
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By:
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Rowan Wren
An immortal prince. A forbidden gateway. A modern city about to discover that vampires are real.
Prince Jael of the Severin never intended to unlock the Crimson Gateway beneath his parents' castle. The portals between medieval Caldaen and Earth had been sealed for centuries, trapping his soul-feeding people within a dying realm. Desperate to save them, Jael forces himself into lucidity, crosses the forbidden passage and emerges in modern-day Oxford.
His arrival reawakens powers that were never meant to return. A mysterious witch senses the breach and intends to kill Jael before he can bring more Severin through. Meanwhile, every soul he consumes strengthens him—and brings him closer to becoming the monster Earth once feared.
Yet Jael is no longer fighting for his people alone. Women from both worlds are drawn into his dangerous orbit, awakening loyalty, desire and power as the Etherweb opens around them. To protect them, Jael must master dream-sorcery, survive the witch hunting him and decide how much of his humanity he is willing to sacrifice.
Vampire in Oxford begins a dark portal-fantasy romance for men featuring an ancient vampire prince, several female lovers, supernatural powers, dangerous witches, explicit romance and a continuing story spanning modern Oxford and medieval Caldaen.
Contains violence, adult themes and explicit M/F and F/F romantic content. Intended for listeners aged 18 and over.
©2026 Rowan Wren (P)2026 Rowan WrenContinue the series
To begin with, while there are multiple points of view, the main character by attention or focus of the book is most certainly Meg, not Jael. Then, almost all of the lore described in the blurb is only remotely hinted at in the book. The blurb describes a book with a male main character and interdimensional action. It also describes a "supernatural romance for men". The book itself, though, is a typical paranormal urban fantasy romance for women with a female main character who is inexplicably irresistible to the powerful alpha vampire, who longs for her. It's full of the emotional language of female-oriented romance, not male. I've read a lot of both men's and women's romance, and this is definitely much more like the latter than the former.
There are a couple of intimate scenes that feel like they have basically been tacked on at the end to tick a couple of boxes. They don't fit the narrative and are squeezed inappropriately into the last hour of the audiobook. If that's what you're interested in then just skip to the last hour and it will make the same amount of sense.
Writing quality is fairly poor, even for self-published KU. I heard plenty of errors, from dangling participles to problems with tense, incorrect and incorrectly anchored pronouns, singular-plural mismatches, incorrect words, and many more. Most of the errors are relatively inconsequential, but other aspects of the writing are more detrimental.
There's an excess of attempts at profundity, resulting in a number of sections with overly meaningful statements such that none of them hold any meaning. These are compounded by flowery mixed metaphors that mostly sound like nonsense. Too much of it reads like bad poetry.
Dialogue is inconsistent. Some of it is believable and natural, but other conversations jump around unnaturally, as if there are parts of the conversations missing. Character behaviour, too, often makes no sense, with people behaving in wildly inconsistent ways. The prose is equally choppy, with sudden changes in location, events, or even scenes with no break, foreshadowing, or explanation. Some scenes are OK on their own, but don't quite fit together with those around them. Occasional unwarranted leaps of intuition or understanding by the characters worsen this effect, as does the haphazard nature of the lore and world-building, which seem to be just collections of things the author thought were cool.
Most of the supernatural scenes seem particularly juvenile. The powers and abilities are inconsistent and make little sense and the discussions around them seem particularly unnatural. The lore seems to change at the whim of the plot, as does the timeline. Some real-life details demonstrate a lack of knowledge and would have been better left out. As a whole, the inconsistencies and continuity problems have a big impact on readability.
Audiobook narration is OK. The author is well spoken and reads relatively well, but some of the pacing is off, with sentences running into each other, unnatural pauses, and some other minor cadence issues. Characterisation is not bad, but can be wildly inconsistent, with character voices changing throughout. Even so, it's not usually difficult to differentiate characters, but some of the voices are very childish. There are also a number of mispronunciations, and some other words that are either mispronunciations or errors in the text; from the audiobook I can't be sure.
I felt moderately entertained by the first two or three hours of this, but it went downhill quickly after that. I had to force myself to finish it. I got to about six hours in and the story was so esoteric and fragmented, with inconsistent nonsense in place of world building, and the next nonsensical mixed metaphor I heard pushed me over the edge. I had really had enough. To make it worse, this is sold as "supernatural men's romance", but it is about as typical of women's urban paranormal romance as a book can be!
With a good editor, and sold as women's romance, it could be worth at least another star, but it is just not very well realised and it doesn't deliver what it promises. The blurb doesn't only oversell the book, it completely misidentifies it. At the very least the mention of "men's romance" should be removed, and the blurb should focus on the main character: Meg. Though the vast majority of the book is about her, she's not even mentioned in the blurb.
Not what it says it is
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