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Live to Tell by Lisa Gardner

7/27/2010

Finally Detective D.D Warren has managed to fit a date into her job obsessed life. But as she’s only thinking of one thing, and wondering how fast she can get there, she’s summoned to a brutal crime scene where evidence points to a man killing his entire family, and then himself. Only it’s not a simple as it seems. The suspect has thrown in a monkey wrench and killed each victim with a different MO. Something that Warren has never encountered before. As she digs her heels into the case, not 48 hours later tragedy strikes again, as another family is killed in nearly the exact fashion. Danielle loves her job on the pediatric psych ward, and she’s good at it. Sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps her from going crazy. But as the anniversary of her family’s brutal killing creeps closer, she’s finding it harder than ever to hang on to her sanity. She can’t seem to stop replaying that night in her mind’s eye, causing her to falter at her job, something she can’t afford to do or children die. Just when she thinks she can’t handle anything else, there are the two mass murders that eerily hit too close to home and send the police calling. Victoria is just trying to stay alive. But it’s hard when every time she turns around, her eight year old son is trying to kill her. But what she doesn’t know is that the day he puts her in the hospital, is the day that reveals her son might be the missing link the police need to bring a mass killer to light. The more I read Gardner’s D.D Warren series, the more I wonder why she’s the fixture of a series in the first place. Warren is not well developed. In this fourth installment, all we seem to know is that she’s a workaholic detective that puts job first and everything else last. Live to Tell is told through the eyes of three different women, our heroine, Danielle and Victoria, where it jumps from each’s perspective, loads up suspects at a whim and teases at the heat that could flare between some of the characters. The plot is good, you never get lost and you’re kept guessing. It’s definitely one of Gardner’s better books, her passion for the story clearly present, and perhaps the hard-to-take subject matter (especially if you’re a parent) might make this her best yet. I keep wondering however, will we ever get to what makes Warren tick?

A Gathering of Crows by Brian Keene

7/27/2010

Say what you will about Brian Keene, but the man has made an impact in horror fiction. Since his Bram Stoker award winning debut novel The Rising landed on bookshelves in 2004 (credited by no less than the New York times as instrumental in kicking off the zombie craze), Keene has attained a dark prose Grand Poobah status in the eyes of genre fans around the globe. With no less than eleven novels since The Rising, assorted short stories, comic book gigs, and a free ongoing serial published through his website, Keene is practically a one-man publishing industry. Unfortunately for Keene’s latest, A Gathering of Crows has proven to be sparse and unimaginative, devoid of any tangible characterization or depth. And while layered nuance may not be what horror fans want out of the author, I can’t imagine that a bland narrative overrun with wooden dialogue is high on the list either. Set in a small town in West Virginia, A Gathering of Crows brings back Levi Stozfus, an ex-Amish Hebraic witch featured in Keene’s book Ghost Walk. On his way to Virginia and stopping only for the night in Brinkley Springs, Levi inconveniently finds himself trapped within the borders of the forgettable hamlet as five demonic entities lay siege to the citizenry, ripping apart anyone and everyone they find. A Gathering of Crows’ whisper thin plot seems more like an appendix for Keene’s burgeoning Labyrinth universe than a stand-alone novel. Filled with alternate earth timelines under attack by The Thirteen (evil forces sworn to destroy God’s creation), the Labyrinth is the Lovecraftian mythos Keene has constructed connecting his various books and the assorted cosmic horrors within. The inter-dimensional conflicts continually spill over into physical reality, unleashing zombies, giant worms, ghouls, and now soul-consuming revenants manifested in a murder of crows. While I am not one to necessarily share advice with bestselling authors (and let’s face it, a book like A Gathering of Crows is red meat to his ravenous readers), Keene could potentially profit more from abbreviating his enormous literary output and focusing on developing stories that operate on more than the primal nihilistic levels that he has explored ad infinitum. The notion that these cataclysmic events are happening simply due to vengeful antics of The Thirteen creates a redundancy of back-story that grows tiresome novel after novel. While Lovecraft was able to loosely connect his pantheon of dark tales with the backbone of the celebrated Cthulhu Mythos, it must be noted that the legendary writer’s body of work manifested primarily in the short form and, in all honesty, should not credibly be compared with Keene’s (even though I just did). With regard to A Gathering of Crows, those who like this sort of thing will find this to be the sort of thing they like. Keene is somewhat of a name brand in the horror market, making him to some extent review proof. Ultimately, his fans will read him no matter what, and Leisure Fiction will continue to pump out his material. His next book, Entombed, already scheduled to drop in February, is a return to Keene’s zombie wheelhouse, and hopefully a homecoming for the sheer narrative velocity and character development of The Rising.

Abraham Kawa: Screaming Silver: A Tale from Pandora’s Box

7/23/2010

Now this was a lovely book I was glad to be given a sample review copy of after meeting the publisher from Greece (Jemma Press) on the first day of the World Horror Convention earlier in the year in Brighton UK. Only 50 copies were ever printed in English so I feel honoured to have one and the they are looking for a UK, US publisher if anyone is interested. I was translated into English and that gives it a different feel too many US or UK writers. With classic 1930’s vampires from the silver screen of a bygone day of horror at its core and full of a wealth of film knowledge that beggars belief. Yet there is a story here, a modern day take on the classic Dracula story, with wild twists and turns that you might not dare to expect. This was something completely off the radar and it punched with a hidden horseshoe hidden in its horror boxing glove sometimes. Some of the facts and lines spoken could do with an English eye before publication, one line about Bristols (a slang term for breasts that died out circa 1979 in the UK) and the word jello instead of jelly in one line raised both my eyebrows in amusement. Plus the police coming from Scotland Yard, hasn’t been true for many a long decade. Yet these are mere translation kinks and did not impact on my enjoyment of the story and I hope to see more of Jemma Press in the years to come. Blurb: Lucian Samuels, an eminent horror movie collector, is found brutally murdered in his London home – right next to the body of his killer, who it turns out, was already dead when he committed the crime. Samuels’ collection is a cornucopia of infamous macabre films that are not supposed to exist, and those that choose to watch them risk madness and a gruesome death. A plane lands at Heathrow Airport, yet its passengers and crew have been massacred in mid-flight. And all around London, the dead are starting to rise... When paranormal investigator Pandora Ormand is drawn into the mystery that connects these events, she finds herself in a labyrinth of secrets and terrors. As the body count rises at an alarming rate, sinister forces are gathering around a prenatural evil that threatens to change reality itself into a nightmare out of the haunted screens of horror films.

Siren Song: A Profile of John Everson

7/21/2010

“Siren was a little different for me,” confides John Everson regarding his most recent novel. “I didn’t want to do vampires. I didn’t want to do zombies.” A cursory glance at retail bookshelves over the past several years does indeed bear the burden of tiresome and predictable subject matter. Without the endless variations on undead adventures and flesh eating apocalypse epics, genre choices have proven somewhat anemic. “I started thinking about what hadn’t already been done a million times before,” Everson continues. “And then I thought of the siren, which has a solid mythological base, and has never really been the subject of a horror novel as a lead character.” The siren, originating in Greek mythology and popularized in Homer’s Odyssey, were alluring supernatural creatures who led sailors to their death with their seductive and irresistible music. “During my research, I came across an old painting of the sirens laying nude on a pile of human carcasses. I thought that this was a really good basis for a horror novel.” Everson, who won the Bram Stoker Award for his debut novel Covenant, has always had an attraction to the darker side of the universe. “I was a sci-fi kid, so I watched a lot of Outer Limits and the Twilight Zone. When I started writing, everything I did ended up being short stories with a nasty twist at the end. So I started focusing more and more on horror.” “Throughout the nineties I published short fiction in all sorts of magazines,” Everson continues. “I love the short form. You can do one in the afternoon and feel a great sense of accomplishment. There’s closure, it’s done, and then I can go watch a movie.” Despite fifteen years of working primarily in short stories, however, Everson made a splash in the publishing world with the previous mentioned Covenant, its sequel Sacrifice, the Argento influenced The 13th (“A result of sitting on my ass and watching Italian horror movies for six months”), and now Siren. “I think I’m becoming more of a novelist now,” he asserts. “When you’re working on a novel, it’s six months of slogging through. Of course, at the end, you’ve got a novel that could be on shelves for years. I’d have to really work to do a 2,000 word story again.” Unfortunately, while it benefits from a premise ripe with potential, Everson’s latest work reads like one of his short stories uncomfortably stretched to a 300-page novel. The tale finds itself trapped in a repetitive loop of a man’s erotic midnight encounters on the beach with the Siren, peppered with the standard gory deaths of random, underdeveloped supporting players (both modern and historic). “Siren also centers on dealing with the loss of a child,” Everson reveals. “This subplot definitely came from being a new father, which makes this book very important to me.” It is through this secondary narrative involving the drowning death of the protagonist’s teenage son where the novel actually shines. The palpable sorrow and guilt from his loss inexorably drags hero Evan into the blackest depths as surely as any wanton Siren. The author’s rendering of a father lost in his pain is brilliant in its emotional agony, a poignant through line that is unfortunately dampened by the ultimate revelation of the truth behind his son’s death. Despite any weaknesses affiliated with Siren, Everson’s immediate writing future promises to be productive with the March release of his fifth novel, The Pumpkin Man (“The jumping off point for the book is a short story I published in Doorways Magazine several years ago”), as well as continued publishing efforts with his own label, Dark Arts Books. “We’re now on our sixth title,” he shares. “Our whole modus operandi is to put together collections of four authors, usually an established author, a couple of cult status writers, and a newbie. We want to introduce people to other authors.” “The market for small press stinks,” Everson discloses. “But we’re still breaking even on every title, making people a little bit of money.” No matter the literary pursuit, Everson plans on remaining firmly within the boundaries of horror. “Horror gets to the root of what it is to be human,” he explains. “We are all driven in a large part by our fears and obsessions. We’ll always have horror stories, we’ll always be wondering if there’s something beyond…unseen. And that’s what the horror genre is all about.”

Frostbite by David Wellington

7/14/2010

What is it about werewolves? In the early-80’s, some of the first cinematic horrors I was exposed to was An American Werewolf in London and The Howling. We could spend hours debating which was the better film (coughthehowlingcough), but this is a lit review, not a fanboy forum on Aint It Cool News. I simply draw attention to these movies in order to illustrate how lycanthropes have really never grabbed the pop culture imagination since John Landis and Joe Dante’s cinematic one-two punch of 1981. Yes, books have been written, and yes, there have been other movies produced, however the werewolf often stands envious of the attention granted to its genre cousins the vampire and zombies. This lack of adequate attention to the werewolf mythos is unfortunate, if only due to the fact that David Wellington’s stellar novel Frostbite probably won’t receive the proper consideration it deserves. After redefining both the walking dead and the undead with Monster Island and 13 Bullets respectively (in addition to their sequels), the author has turned his razor sharp prose to the criminally underrepresented lupines. Set in the vast Northwest Territories of Canada, Frostbite wastes little time as it plummets into a world of survival, redemption, and forgiveness. Chey, the protagonist, is resolute in her determination to track down the man/wolf who ripped her father to pieces before her adolescent eyes, setting the young heroine on an emotionally aimless course through life. That is until she is offered an opportunity for revenge. As is often the case with Wellington’s stories, the plot of Frostbite, while superbly effective, is incidental next to the intense characterization of not only Chey, but also Powell, the alpha wolf who has spent more than a lifetime searching for a place to veil himself from the world. It is through them that the author deconstructs the typical Manichean good versus evil dynamic of the werewolf, and reveals the devastating toll that the curse takes on its victims. As for the rendering of the actual werewolves, they are a uniquely supernatural creature manifesting in a type of spiritual transformation, emerging as a separate conscious being with all the fury and power of nature’s wrath thrown in for good measure. Rather than the oft utilized trope of the werewolf representing the primal state of man, these wolves simply stand alone, with a remorseless desire to be free, to be forever wolf. More akin to the prehistoric dire wolf, Wellington imbues his creations with an intelligence and ferocity that overtakes the humanity of the cursed whenever the moon rises. Frostbite is breakneck in its pace, frenetic even in its more casual moments as the constant ticking clock of nightfall is ever present for the cast. Furthermore, the narrative perspective of the fully transformed wolf is breathtaking in its descriptive palate, cognizant, yet predatory and instinctual in its fragmented style. The first in a series (Overwinter premiers in September), Wellington has successfully laid the groundwork for an epic werewolf legend. Mythological in its scope while grounded in an organic reality that provides depth and weight to the proceedings, Frostbite is an exhilarating, gruesome, and enthralling literary creature feature for modern horror fans.

More Than One Life to Live: A Profile of Alexandra Sokoloff

7/12/2010

“I am staggered at how lucky I am,” exclaims Alexandra Sokoloff, author of the newly released novel Book of Shadows. “I’m making a living writing exactly what I want to write, and getting everything I write published. That’s a delirious kind of success!” Where she sees luck, however, others might see a boundlessly creative and deserving writer dedicated to her craft. No longer a fresh face to the scene, Sokoloff has happily transitioned from her role as frustrated screenwriter to bestselling author, producing four well-received works of fiction since 2006. “Writing novels is a slower, deeper rhythm, and I love that. Publishing is worlds different from Hollywood. You get to complete every project you start, which is so incredibly satisfying. It’s fantastic!” In addition to her novels, Sokoloff is involved in several side projects, such as her non-fiction workbook Screenwriting Tricks For Authors (and Screenwriters!), as well as numerous other upcoming ventures. “I am extremely excited about a novel I have just finished with Sarah Langan, Sarah Pinborough, and Rhodi Hawk, [entitled] Apocalypse. It’s actually four novellas that are intricately interwoven into a single book. [And] I’ve written a paranormal for Harlequin… called The Shifters. Not quite as scary as my others, but lots of sex to make up for it.” Since leaving Hollywood to focus on her Bram Stoker award winning debut novel The Harrowing, Sokoloff has found that her particular blend of eroticism, horror, spiritualism and mystery has conjured a devoted audience. “I am very aware of my mandate to scare people,” she explains. “But it’s a nail-biting, hair-raising, psychological kind of chill that I’m going for. I think The Price is my only true horror novel, but it’s so psychological that the horror creeps up on you.” “I’m proudly writing in a long Gothic horror tradition,” expounds Sokoloff. “I think what distinguishes my stories from a lot of obvious horror is that I always ground everything that happens in reality, which means that there could be a psychological or criminal interpretation to the supernatural occurrences that are going on.” This subjective approach to Sokoloff’s fiction claws its way to the forefront of her recently published novel Book of Shadows. The story unfolds initially as a James Patterson-ish police procedural, following Boston detectives investigating the violent and apparently ritualistic murder of a young college student. Not surprisingly, things run askew for the authorities when bewildering evidence and the sudden emergence of a mysterious woman threaten to rupture the unassailable case against their swiftly apprehended suspect. “It’s my most realistic book. I wanted to write a [story] that would pit a very outwardly rational, logic-driven man against a very otherworldly, psychic, subconsciously driven woman, and play with the line between what is real and what is supernatural.” “I thought I could create some great chemistry and distrust between the characters there,” she explains. “A paranormal noir, if you will.” Another reoccurring theme in Sokoloff’s work is the decidedly pronounced focus on strong, yet considerably troubled, female characters. “I write…from a specifically feminine point of view, and that’s a very conscious effort. Women know a lot about horror.” Robin from The Harrowing, Laurel from The Unseen, and now Tanith from Book of Shadows adorn Sokoloff’s hall of heroines with dark pasts filled with secrets, hidden agendas and raw trauma. “You don’t live in this world as a woman without becoming troubled in some way. We know what it is to be raped, battered, prostituted, enslaved, disenfranchised, underpaid, demeaned, harassed; we live horror on a much more intimate basis than most men ever do.” While a serviceable and solid police thriller, Book of Shadows falls well short of the standard set by Sokoloff’s superlative novel The Price. Slightly uneven in tone, her newest seems unable to decide exactly what kind of story it aspires to be. Garrett, the detective caught up in the middle of an is-it-real-or-not journey into the paranormal, seems to waver every other chapter despite mounting evidence that not only have they arrested the wrong killer, but that the source of the danger is unquestionably not of this world. Despite these issues, Book of Shadows moves along at an exciting clip, dragging the reader into a wholly satisfying hallucinogenic whirlwind of criminal investigations, witchcraft, and suppressed sexual desires. Without a doubt, Sokoloff is rapidly becoming one of the more exhilarating writers working in the industry today, churning out dark and often erotic adventures that both stimulate and thrill. “I have vast distances to go on this whole journey,” the author observes. “But the way I’m writing now, I can easily write one or two books a year. That is a lot of stories to write, a lot of worlds to explore, a lot of lives to live.”

Characters Welcome: A Profile of David Wellington

7/12/2010

The journey of David Wellington from aspirant published author to horror genre literary powerhouse is well documented, and the source of infinite envy for those attempting to photocopy his success. “I couldn’t get published to save my life,” Wellington explains. “A friend suggested I could put some of my work on his blog. The first day I got seventeen hits. By the time I was finishing up my first serialized novel, it was something like forty thousand hits per update. That was when the publishers came calling.” Since 2006, Wellington has unleashed a consistent barrage of creature features, starting with his three-book zombie epic Monster Island, Monster Nation and Monster Planet, the riveting Laura Caxton centered vampire series that spans four books (soon to be five) beginning with 13 Bullets, and most recently his spin on the werewolf mythos Frostbite, with the sequel Overwinter due out in September. “I grew up reading genre novels when I was a kid. They were meant for…fans of those genres. I was one of those fans. Still am. I love horror because I like old monster movies and all the gothic trappings.” Wellington’s greatest success thus far has undoubtedly come through the aforementioned Laura Caxton, heroine of the author’s vampire tales. Undeniably stalwart and intelligent, Caxton also bears the distinction of being one of the only lesbian leading ladies in modern horror literature. “She's based on my sister, who is in fact gay. She used to tell me these horror stories of what she went through before she came out. A lot of that went into the character.” Wellington was determined, however, not to make Caxton’s sexual orientation a hollow gimmick. “Caxton being gay has very little to do with her character. I didn't even know she was gay until I wrote the scene near the beginning of 13 Bullets when she comes home from work and climbs into bed. I said, okay, there's somebody in the bed already waiting for her. It turned out to be another woman, which surprised me as much as anybody.” “I’ve gotten a lot of very nice comments from individuals saying that they appreciate the fact that Caxton is gay,” Wellington continues. “But that doesn't define who she is. I fully expected some kind of backlash, but it turns out that the kinds of people who read books are also the kind of people who live in the 21st century.” This type of deep, nuanced characterization is one of the hallmarks of Wellington’s work. From the adolescent girl soldiers in Monster Island, to an incarcerated baby killer in 23 Hours, to a conflicted lycanthrope in Frostbite, the author fills his novels with consistently well-rounded and motivated cast members. “I'm the kind of guy who, if I see somebody on the subway train wearing a bizarre hat, I need to know why he put that hat on. And because you can't just ask people, I end up making up my own story.” “I do a fair amount of outlining beforehand, and a lot of research, but mostly it's about the characters,” Wellington explains. “The idea is usually a scene, or even just an image. Typically it will be the climax of the book, the last big scene. Then I work backwards thinking: How did those characters get into such a preposterous mess? When I reach the beginning, the moment when destiny conspired to put them in that scene or image, then I start typing.” For Laura Caxton, destiny, in the form of Wellington’s rich imagination, will continue to push her into the fray with 32 Fangs, due out in 2011. “I'm working on it right now,” he reveals.” Readers will recall that, at the conclusion of 23 Hours, Caxton was a fugitive from justice, breaking out of prison while also avoiding the clutches of the malevolent vampire Justina Malvern. “I don't want to give anything away, but there are plenty of other people involved in the plot now, and some of them are up to some surprising things.” In addition to his ongoing vampire marathon, the author has provided a free new online serial novel entitled Plague Zone, an original zombie adventure featuring a hero Wellington describes as “the toughest librarian in post-apocalyptic Seattle,” something the former Library Science major might know a little something about. Decidedly different from his Monster series zombies, these flesh eaters are more akin to victims of mad cow disease than anything supernatural. The story can be read in its entirety at http://brokentype.com/pz/. Beyond the releases of Overwinter and 32 Fangs, Wellington is decidedly non-committal about his future plans (“How about a vacation?"). While a break would be well deserved after redefining the zombie, vampire and werewolf subgenres, one can only wonder what comes next for the prolific writer. “I try never to predict the future,” he muses. “That way I'm never wrong.”

TheNovelBlog.com Welcomes Jess Peacock!

7/12/2010

Hey All, Just dropping a note letting you know of our latest reviewer : Jess Peacock. He comes to us from his own blog, http://thecrawlspaceonline.blogspot.com, and will now be contributing here as well. Welcome aboard, Jess. Now get to work! :) - Dan.

Spotlight on Cherie Priest

7/12/2010

“My stuff tends to skew dark,” explains novelist Cherie Priest, author of the Hugo Award nominated novel Boneshaker. “But I’m comfortable with that. I kind of bounce around between genres.” Considered a vanguard of steampunk, Priest’s Boneshaker creates a densely imaginative alternate 1880 (“I don't let the facts get in the way of a good story”) where a large section of Seattle has been walled off from the rest of the world after a massive drill, the titular Boneshaker, inadvertently unleashes an ominous gas that transforms those who inhale it into the walking dead. More akin to the late 1960’s television series The Wild, Wild West (“It’s absolutely an early steampunk work”) than the typical Victorian-era British locales most associated with the subgenre, Boneshaker nevertheless delivers the expected trappings with crudely fabricated zeppelins, peculiar pneumatic powered weapons, and mechanized surgically grafted prosthetics. “Steampunk is a lot of fun,” Priest says. “It has these undercurrents of conservationism (it's very reduce/reuse/recycle in its philosophy), and it overlaps nicely with the do-it-yourself movement.” “There's a great deal of neat stuff going on in the subculture right now,” Priest continues. “It's really exploding all over the country, so I'm thrilled and proud to be part of it.” This upsurge in the popularity of steampunk is undoubtedly due in some small part to the hybridization of other genres found in Boneshaker. By infusing Romero-like walking dead into the mix, Priest cracks open the door to prospective readers who wouldn’t normally be concerned with the exploits of their goggle-wearing brethren. “Steampunk,” she lightheartedly explains, “is what happens when Goths discover brown.” For horror aficionados, however, the zombies of Boneshaker may prove wanting, as they exist more for nudging characters toward their narrative destinations, and less as a tangible threat to the cast of characters. Aside from one disposable individual succumbing to zombification (due to the gas and not an attack), the undead hordes in Boneshaker seem to be nothing more than a pointless piece of window dressing feigning horror legitimacy. This use of such a menagerie of styles can be traced back to Priest’s adolescence, where an appreciation for many of the classic genre writers may not have been encouraged by her family, but was certainly tolerated. “My first big influences were the horror and mystery writers of the nineteenth century, mostly Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. Those were the first writers I loved. I wasn't allowed to read much fiction, but if it was old enough to qualify as ‘literature’ then sometimes I could get away with it.” These traditional brush strokes bleed through in Boneshaker, as the main villain Minnericht bears a distinct philosophical similarity to Professor Moriarty (as well as a physical one to Cobra Commander), the mysterious and brilliant arch-nemesis to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Packed with such a potentially interesting cast culled from classic westerns and science-fiction stories alike, Boneshaker works overtime at creating its share of memorable players, not the least of these being the aforementioned Minnericht. “First and foremost, it has to be about people,” Priest explains of her work. “I’ve read some books with outstanding world building and magic systems, but they have no soul if they don't have characters for people to relate to.” Despite this mandate, while Boneshaker succeeds in creating an exquisitely organic world, it unfortunately fails to similarly render the characters inhabiting the story. Briar, the heroine, and her son Zeke show very little growth or internal development, accompanying the reader from one glorious steampunk set piece to the next with very little emotion or heart. Furthermore, while the protagonists interact with the astonishing and often alarming world around them, they ultimately have very little impact on their environment as a whole. This is not to say that Boneshaker entirely fails as a novel. At times, Priest’s prose succeeds as an epic work of family and loyalty, tapping into parental concerns of misshapen legacies, adolescent rebellion, and heartbreaking self-realization. Combined with the inspired world called forth in the novel, Boneshaker is at least deserving of the attention it has garnered, even if it shouldn’t be highly recommended to a darker audience.

Bite Me by Christopher Moore

7/12/2010

It has been 15 years since Christopher Moore introduced us to Jody and Flood, the titular characters of the delightful novel Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story. Since then, we have become acquainted with a motley supporting cast of characters, including an Emperor of San Francisco and his loyal canines, a raucous group of corner store employees tagged the Animals, a Hot Topic Goth girl with nosferatu dreams, a nefarious blue skinned Las Vegas stripper, a sadistic vampire Lord, and a pair of detectives who constantly find themselves way in over their well intentioned heads. So when Moore adds a giant vampire cat into the mix, suffice to say it seems perfectly fitting. Picking up right after the events of the second novel You Suck, Moore leans on the narration of the returning Abby Normal, a love struck vampire wannabe with delusions of dark poetic grandeur, to bring the reader up to speed. And while it is Normal’s somewhat annoying, often hilarious commentary that opens and concludes Bite Me, the story is still effectively that of Jody and Tommy’s passionate, albeit troubled relationship. Throughout the trilogy Moore has effectively mined the pitfalls of falling in love (Bloodsucking Fiends), finding balance and compromise in a committed relationship (You Suck), and now, with Bite Me, the author explores the uncertainty and heartache that can result when two people who love each other want different things in life, and the difficult choices they must make as a result. Honestly, the plot of the book is thin to nonexistent, which is pretty much par for the course with Moore’s vampire series. Chet, the previously mentioned feline bloodsucker, is running riot throughout San Francisco while building an unstoppable undead cat army, and it falls on everyone involved to stop the encroaching menace. While there is a little more to it than that (a feral Tommy, a crispy Jody, and a rat tail on Abby), the focus of Bite Me is more concerned with bringing to a conclusion the intimate journey of our vampire lovers. Lest you assume that Moore has decided to cash in on the schmaltzy pseudo-Harlequin romance of the Twilight series, rest assured that Bite Me provides its share of blood, action, and signature bawdy humor that the “authorguy” is known for. Not to mention a fun cameo or two of other characters from the Mooreverse, including an entirely unexpected Rastafarian (hint, hint) spin on Bram Stoker’s Renfield. A pleasant return to form after the abysmal Fool, Moore’s Bite Me is perverse, touching, and hilarious, often all within the same page, a fitting conclusion to an epic tale of undead love, hot monkey sex, and frozen turkey bowling.