Buffy's 'Faith Trials' falters

There's something horribly wrong with the idea of novelizing a formulaic teenie-bop television show. But with the teen genre fiction market so hot, publishers will take anything that sells, and since Sarah Michelle Gellar sells, so does the line of novelized books.\n"Vol. 1 The Faith Trials" manages to cram four shows into a mere 200 pages. Filled with formulaic plots that could fit into any teen action show, the stories chronicle the adventures of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and her new slayer companion, Faith.\n"The Faith Trials" assumes that its readership already knows the backbone for the Buffy series, which isn't much of a set-up to begin with. Buffy hunts and kills vampires -- that's about it. But she's not alone, there's a whole cast of supporting characters with outrageous names such as Xander, Oz and Willow who help Buffy whenever she's in a bind, then proceed to make references to oral sex. Really, how flat can they get?\nEach plot introduces a new villain that Buffy and Faith courageously conquer, such as Kakistos, Blathazar and The Mayor. Then there's the emotional twist thrown in for kicks. Be it Buffy's jealousy for Faith or her love of Angel, the show's writers (sorry, I refuse give author James Laurence any credit for this book) just keep the action and intensity high throughout. Note sarcasm.\nFaith, a character created for this series, is a watcher-less slayer (apparently each slayer has to have somebody to watch them -- absurd really) who has been wandering for some time now only to wander upon Buffy's slaying grounds. Throughout these interwoven stories, Buffy and Faith bond, then break apart, then bond, then break apart again. The repetition is annoying to no end. When together, the two fight to save Sunnydale from the hoard of vampires that seem to pop up every evening.\nBut what about the vampires? Except for a few of the primary villains, there is no description of them or their life. Are they truly just evil creatures that wander soulless through the night, striving to feed upon any mortal they can find? Where's the humanity that Anne Rice so eloquently portrays with her vampires? Instead they are the generic "Dracula"-style vampires, with all the myths fully intact but minus any semblance of the romance.\nWhere this book falters is in its attempt to novelize a show that is intended primarily as eye candy. There's no denying the fact that Gellar herself is a prime draw for the television show, but this book fails to capture Gellar's looks in print. It should come as no surprise that the pictorial insert is the book's one saving grace. Perhaps Buffy's marketing team should resort to simply selling picture books.