My copy is here.
And let me tell you, that occultist friend of mine is getting a copy of this for his birthday, he just doesn't know it yet. It's so his thing.
But that's beside the point! My impressions...
Well, for starters, I put off opening the thing until the sun set, and lit a hoity toity cuban-tobacco-and-bergamot candle for extra cheese factor. I rolled my eyes like I usually do at Llewellyn's packaging, with the silly white box that is far too big for the cards and made of toilet paper besides (plus that little tear-off bit, what the hell is up with that?). The book came out first, and I'm impressed with the quality there -- no pages fell out when I riffled through it, clean and readable typesetting with no frou-frou fonts to go with the Vampyre theme.
As for the deck, WOW. That's both a sarcastic wow and a serious wow. First wow: the art is nice. Very nice. As a painter myself, I appreciate what the artist is doing here, and he does it very well. Second wow: hot damn this thing is cheesy. It's dripping with cheese. The first thing I thought of was, like I said in my last post, Elizabethan drama. You know how in those days, female roles were played by boy actors? And how in some plays, the boy actor would be playing a girl who had disguised herself as a boy? In one play there's even a boy playing a girl disguised as a boy playing a girl on a stage within the play. The vampires remind me of that, in two senses -- one, a lot of them are ambiguously gendered, so I keep thinking "hmm, this looks like a woman but might be a boy" or "this looks like a man but I'm pretty sure those hips belong to a girl". Secondly, they strike me as being very dramatic vampires in the sense that they're almost doubly unreal -- I think of them as vampires pretending to be humans who are playing vampires on stage. Layers and layers of metaphorical costuming, here. It offsets the cheese factor by appealing to my obsession with theatrical history. I had no problems with sticky cards, paint chips, or cardstock flaws. The little nudity displayed is quite tasteful.
I like the Thothiness of it, how the book doesn't use canned RWS meanings like most themed decks, and especially how the book and the deck make sense together (which should be obvious, given how the artist wrote the book, but I've read some pretty awful companion volumes by deck creators). However, this is not a deck I'd use in any sort of professional situation. Storytelling, sure; readings for myself or for close friends, definitely -- it doesn't strike me as simply an art deck, it IS readable -- but I would never bring this to a reading for a stranger.
I have some minor quibbles. The art is one of them; a couple of the cards don't seem to express quite the same level of skill as the rest, mostly in the hand/wrist area, and the Nine of Grails hits all my WTF meters for anatomy and composition (and also because it's tasteless, but surprisingly, it's the only card in the deck that made me want to yell). My other quibble is that some of the cards just plain don't make sense on first glance -- The Star springs to mind from when I was flipping through. Yes, The Star often features a woman pouring water into a pond or some such object, but the vampire Star is just dripping blood from her goblets willy-nilly. The book does explain the image fairly well, but I like my cards to make sense at first glance. (This is either my professional artist brain talking, or I'm just picky. I'm not sure. Maybe both.)
Of course, my inner teenage gothy-girl, who insists on wearing corsets every day, and cutting herself artistically, and smoking marijuana out of a skull hookah -- she loves it, precisely because it's ridiculous and absurd.
It's not a deck I'd recommend for someone who's super-serious about tarot, for sure! But it's a good solid set despite how corny it appears.