Ooey Gooey Glory

Do you want gore?  Do you want blood?  Do you want some vicious vampire action?  Here it is.  I kept stopping to mull over the fact that this book sounds like it was written to be a movie:  lots of action, contrived situations (that didn’t really bother me) and an unlikely love interest.  There’s even some nice inclusion of vampire references from historical and pop culture.  Oh, and FREAKING FRANKENSTEIN IS THERE! But really, it’s about the gore.  Gore, gore, and more gore.  If you are having problems getting a 14-year-old boy who plays Call of Duty to read a book, give him this.  Who doesn’t want to own your own personal stake-on-a-spring to kill vampires?  The book stands alone well, but is part of a new series.  I might read the next one, but I need to take a break from gooey explosions for a while.  4 out of 5 gold bags of O Negative to Will Hill.  The book, by the way, is Departent 19.

Pretty Dark Nothing

Oh, the demons.  The demons!  I’m not sure if this is a coming-of-age story, mean girl story, boy-meets-girl story, teenage angst story, or demon/angel story.  I think it’s all of them.  That’s right; you get five distinct categories of story in one book.  Aren’t you lucky? ...Not really.  There is just too much going on all the time.  ALL THE TIME.  You get to hear the happenings as you ping-pong between the POV of Aaron and Quinn (aka – the angst-y musician and the girl who sees demons) as things fall apart.  Quinn is quite literally going insane as she is hunted and tormented by evil, scaly demons who materialize at the most inconvenient times.  She’s pining after her ex-boyfriend and has started sucking at life.  Aaron was in a car wreck, oh wait, SPOILER ALERT, that killed his mom and sister. Or was he? Dum-dum-DUM!  We’ll leave it at that.  Well, he also has some nasty scars and personal issues stacked higher than Kilimanjaro.  Sounds like a real catch, no?  So, can Aaron save Quinn from the demons, and, quite possibly, herself?  Don’t plan too much on finding out.  Quinn is such a train wreck, which in all fairness is the point, that nothing ever seems to really get resolved. The end of this book, which I suppose is meant as a cliffhanger to the next installment, left me annoyed, but not trolling the internet wildly searching for leaked editions of the next book.  One thing that I do give the author high props for is finding sneaky spots to include some interesting vocabulary which can introduce readers to some words that actually may make them grab a dictionary…or at least Google it.