Midwinter Blood by Marcus Sedgwick YP FIC SEDGWICK

A reporter in 2073 investigates a remote island said to have discovered the secret to immortality, an archeologist in 2011 tries to dig the island's secrets from the ground, a downed pilot in WW II trying to go home, further back a painter, further back a ghost, further still a vampire, and last or first a Viking king.  Throughout it all a love that lives and dies again and again.  Seven stories that all make on tale of Midwinter Blood.

I can see very easily why this won the prestigious Printz Award. It is dark, lyrical, haunting, and stays with you every time you put the book down. It is a sad, beautiful, and frightening look at lives interconnected by love, loss, and violence. This isn't a ghastly and gory look-out-it's-right-behind-you!!! kind of book, it's a much creepier slow building tension. The feeling of inevitable and inescapable doom. The very first chapters introduce you to a strange, seemingly perfect island. Since, we've all seen the movies and read the books about perfect small towns, that alone puts the reader on edge. Sedgwick ratchets up the tension quickly but vaguely. You know something is very wrong, but not what. This will be a recurring theme!  

Sedgwick jumps each story further back in time repeating images, phrases, and similar characters. This can be maddening at first, because you get so little to go on to solve the ever weirder mystery. Even when you finish the book entirely you may feel like you have more questions than answers. I'd like to go on record as calling that a good thing. It's so refreshing to read a book that respects teen readers enough to let them come up with their own answers.

What's so great about this book, is that it's deep and simple.  Sedgwick relies on as few words as necessary making it a stark and spare style that fits his story and themes perfectly. It also makes it so much easier to be swept quickly again and again on the currents of time. This is a rare and unique novel that should be read by anyone that loves a good story, especially a dark and haunting one

You can find Midwinter Blood in our catalog here.

 

SHOCKTOBER The Waking Dark by Robin Wasserman YP FIC WASSERMAN

In Oleander they call it the Killing Night.  One night, five murderers, no motives.  Only one of the five lived and she's locked away. Locked away like the memories.  Until the storm.  The storm that rips the city wide open. The town is surrounded by troops, quarantined. Something dark has woken up in Oleander.  Something that can make anyone a killer. And it's inside everyone.

The story is told from the perspcetives of Ellie: a girl that thinks God is speaking to her, West: a popular jock with a secret, Daniel: son of the local crazy man, Jule: unwilling part of the town's infamous meth family, and Cass: the only killer to survive Killing Night.  The jumps in perspective help keep thing interesting and help build a sense of closeness to the book's characters.  It also helps us see lots of the town slowly unraveling from different points and builds the tension to a fever pitch.  Wasserman does a good job of developing the characters, so that even if you won't be crazy for all of them, at least one will speak to you.  Then she starts the slaughter and no one is safe, so the fear gets ratcheted up fast and furious.  I've read several reviews that compare this book to early Steven King and I think that is accurate and very intentional.  It has a secluded small town going crazy, authority figures turning into mad despots, and several other classic King touches.  It is bleak, depressing, terrifying, and totally riveting.  It is definitely a long read and after some early mayhem goes for a long slow build, but it truly pays off.  Wasserman handles the emotional moments and the building relationships with a deft hand.  This makes the first deaths all the more shocking and the later violence almost numbing, with jolts of terror.  It's quite effective as horror and also a clever look at the idea of the violence within our society.  I'd definitely only recommend it to people that can stomach dark and violent reads, but for fans of serious horror this is one of the best books in a long while. 

You can find The Waking Dark in our catalog here.

SHOCKTOBER Zom-B series by Darren Shan YP FIC SHAN

Having already reviewed the super awesome Zom-B, I waited for three more volumes to do an update. Just in time for Shocktober!

SPOILER ALERT: Do NOT read this review if you don't want Zom-B Volume 1's big secrets revealed.







B (AKA Becky, that's right twist ending B is a girl lady!!!) wakes up months after being attacked by a zombie and having her HEART RIPPED OUT OF HER CHEST!!!  Now she is a Zom-B, but unlike the shuffling masses she has her memories and her own mind.  Unfortunately, she is a prisoner/test subject of a secretive military force that is keeping her Underground. She may just find that there really are fates worse than death!

B has left the underground military installation (NO SPOILERS ON HOW!) and is roaming the ravaged remains of London.  Holding as best she can to the semblance of humanity as she tries to find other survivors and escape the horrors of the dead, the living, and the worst: The mutants and the demonic clown of death, Mr. Dowling.





B has been found by others like her. Revitalized, zombies that think.  They call themselves the angels and say they can save the world, but can she trust them? And is she willing to walk away from the only people left on Earth that are like her?







This series is getting better, creepier, gorier, and more nightmare inducing.  It's already up to four volumes with a fifth volume soon to hit our shelves, so you have some catching up to do.  however, with Halloween around the corner this is the perfect time!  Each volume is a quick read, that leaves you wanting to tear open a fresh volume like the shambling undead tear open skulls!  Sorry, that was a little gross, but NOTHING compared to the fiendish horrors and atrocities that Shan has nightmared up for us! Mr. Dowling is absolute nightmare fuel and every time he shows up something gut wrenching (often literally) is sure to happen.  It filled we with a perverse sense of dread and eagerness to see what he would do next, which is the perfect thing in a horror book.  I think Shan has really got a great protagonist with street tough B.  She's just good enough and bad enough to both root for and be believable.  Shan has also populated the world with some fascinatingly freaky survivors for her to run into and keeps thing fresh by introducing just enough new faces to feel lively without getting confusing as to who is who.  It helps that he often slaughters loads of characters to keep you on your toes.  Sometimes I think that the REAL zombie plague is how many new zombie books and movies keep coming out, but this is one of the few shining stars in the field.  Its fast paced, creepy, gross, and filled with some truly clever twists.

You can find Zom-B: Underground in our catalog here.
Zom-B: City in our catalog here.
Zom-B: Angels in our catalog here.

Extremities: Stories of Death, Murder, and Revenge by David Lubar YP FIC LUBAR

A group of girls give their gym teacher a dose of her own medicine, a boy plots the perfect murder of his 'perfect' parent, a boy falls for a girl so beautiful she's to die for, and ten more tales of doom from David Lubar.

David Lubar opens by saying "This is not a book for children," but honestly I think this would be a pretty good read for horror fans of many ages.  Sure it has a good amount of death, dismemberment, and murderous teens, but the carnage and gore is kept to a nice minimum.  It makes for a nice alternative to the likes of Charlie Higson and Darren Shan's hyper-gory scare fests.  I love all the guts and grime of their books, but its nice to have creepy alternatives that don't get so vivid about viscera.  It reminds me of a modern update to the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series (J 398.25 SCHWARTZ), which is my gold standard for creepy!  The stories are almost all very quick.  Just long enough to set a mood and pull off a fun or sick or shocking (or a combination of the three) twist and end strong.  But he's really good at pacing the longer stories, so they are just as compelling as the quick ones.  His writing is super simple and very easy to read, which works very well for the type of page turning, look over your shoulder, goosebump raising stories he's writing.  A really fun and classically creepy read for the horror fans from casual to serious.
You can find Extremities in our catalog here.

Hellboy: The Bride of Hell and Others by Mike Mignola Illustrated by Rixhard Corben, Kevin Nowlan, and Scott Hampton YP FIC MIGNOLA

He was summoned from hell, but fights on the side of the angels. Hellboy continues his unending quest to fight all forms of evil in this collection of short comics.  He faces a carnivorous house, vampire Mexican wrestlers, space aliens that dabble in the occult, vengeful mummies, ghost cows, and even more!

The various anthology collections of Hellboy are always some of his most fun, weird adventures, and this is definitely towards the very top of his best shorts collection.  Mignola very rarely draws anymore, but he is so well respected in comics that he can get the best illustrators in all of comics to work with him.  Both Richard Corben and Kevin Nowlan were all but retired, and Mignola was able to convince them to draw full comics.  This makes for some of the most richly drawn, inventive horror comics being drawn today.  The stories are all short and pack a lot of great twists, gags, and sublime weirdness in as few panels as possible.  My personal favorites have to be the vampire ghost story and the story about the house that eats people. However all the other stories are just as perfectly bizarre. All in all this is a must read for fans of comics of all stripes, and might make a great stepping in point for people looking to get into comics.

You can check our catalog for The Bride of Hell and Others here.

Zom-B by Darren Shan YP FIC SHAN

Everyone thought it was a joke, a hoax, anything but real.  There’s no such thing as zombies.  B just puts it out of her mind and tries to go about her ‘normal’ life.  But B is wondering more and more how normal her life really is.  She tells herself that even though B's dad is a bigot and has a short fuse, he’s basically okay, but more and more B has to face the evil from inside B's dad and inside.  That’s only if B survives!  Turns out flesh eating zombies ARE real and they’re really hungry!

Okay, I totally get that there are about 18 billion zombie books on the market right now, so it is pretty difficult to wade through the moaning hordes of books.  But Darren Shan is a no-brainer for writing a zombie series!  He is the absolute king of modern gross out teen horror!  And he has made a bold and bloody claim to have the best zombie series out there.  What I love is that this book starts with a bloody bang of zombie mayhem, then switches gears and looks at B’s day to day life and what makes B tick.  And B is not our typical hero.  B’s seriously conflicted about following in B's father’s racist footsteps, but too scared to challenge the life B has.  And that conflict is interesting enough even before zombies start ripping people’s brains out!  And the bloody, gruesome violence will not let down Darren Shan fans or any zombie lovers that like their action fast and brutal.  The central mystery of what is causing the outbreaks and who the mystery figure that B calls Owl Man and what makes the mutants different form the zombies will have to be solved in future volumes.  The book definitely ends with a heart-rending climax that will leave readers drooling for the next title.

I’d say that this is the first zombie horror series that stands up to my all-time favorite zombie series The Enemy books by Charlie Higson.  Weird that they both take place in England! The Brits have a lockdown on my favorite zombie fiction! This is the first part of a 12 part series, but you’ll rip through the slender volumes so fast you’ll be left wanting more.  Fortunately, Shan promises a volume every 3 months and we already have Underground the second book in the series. I’ll definitely be following this one and will keep you all recapped after a few more volumes to let you know how the mystery unfolds.

You can check our catalog for Zom-B here.

The Rising: A Department 19 novel by Will Hill YP FIC HILL

Jamie is now an official member of Department 19, the secret monster hunting wing of the government, and is starting to settle into the non-stop grind of hunting monsters.  Paired with his vampire-turned-vampire-hunter girlfriend Larissa and friend Kate, they’ve been given the toughest assignment imaginable: find and destroy the resurrected Dracula before he regains his strength and takes over the world.

This is one of my favorite action series on the shelves.  Will Hill is a maestro of hard hitting action scenes.  He does a great job of making his purer than pure evil villains fun to hate and root against and is great at switching POV and timelines.  We get chapters form the viewpoint of Dracula, Kate, Larissa (she's my favorite because she's tormented), our hero Jamie, and a couple of others thrown in.  This keeps twists and turns coming aplenty and the book moving relatively briskly (parts of the middle section gets a tad slow, but picks up again with a vengeance).  It’s crazy how fast I tore through this brick of a book.  It’s nearly 600 pages but reads so quickly with a just-one-more-chapter-and-then-I’ll-sleep appeal that’s hard to resist.  My only gripe is that the characters aren’t all that interesting when they aren’t killing bad guys and that our hero is way too perfect. When the bullets and stakes start flying and the blood is pouring I oddly seem to forget all about it.  A must read for any fan of action, fast paced horror thrillers, or action horror.  Darren Shan fans might even have a new favorite author. I would read the first book before grabbing this one though, but that's just TWO awesome books you get to read.

You can check our catalog for The Rising here.

Blood Ninja III: The Betrayal of the Living by Nick Lake YP FIC LAKE

The evil Lord Oda is dead (after already being dead, then undead, and now totally dead), but Taro’s greatest challenge is still ahead.  He must vanquish a dragon in order to get permission to marry the girl he loves.  Wait fighting dragons to win the heart of a fair lady is supposed to be for knights, nit vampire ninjas!?  Taro is doomed!  As if that wasn’t enough to worry about the dead are rising.  No, not vampires, ZOMBIES!  The super, evil and very creepy Kenji has crawled back from the dead and is raising an army of corpses to destroy all he sees.  OH!  Also, Taro’s very own flesh and blood family plans to betray him!  Being a vampire ninja in feudal Japan is ROUGH!

Vampire ninjas VS Dragons and Zombies!  What’s not to love!? This is a great finale to a wonderful action series.  This book, like the two before it (read my reviews here and here), have loads of fast paced action and ultra-violence, perfectly evil villains to root for, and enough plot twists to keep things interesting.  Also, Nick Lake does a nice amount of research to make the Japanese setting feel real and authentic.  Basically the Blood Ninja series is like a super awesome manga series without the pictures.  It doesn’t have the most realistic characters, but they aren’t boring or entirely one note either.  The heroes are almost always outmatched and that makes for tense and exciting action sequences.  The romantic plot does get a little sparkly when Taro learns that he can’t be with Hana without turning her into a vampire, but that never drags the plot down to a soap opera.  This is a must read for fans of action, manga, or historical-fiction-fantasy-horror.

You can check our catalog for Blood Ninja III here.

Severed by Scott Snyder and Scott Tuft Illustrated by Attila Futaki YP FIC SNYDER

When twelve year old Jack Garron ran away to meet the father he never knew he didn’t just hit the road, he entered the food chain.  The year is 1916 and it is a hard time for the country and a dangerous time to be a boy on his own.  More dangerous than Jack could ever imagine. An old man with razor sharp teeth and a hunger for the flesh of children is hunting Jack and Jack has no idea he’s fallen into his clutches.  Jack will learn that evil walks the roads, all dreams have a cost, and nightmares are real.  

This is a truly chilling and twisted comic.  Snyder has been writing some of the darkest and grittiest Batman stories ever of late (see my review of The Black Mirror here) and he clearly knows how to look into the dark spots of the human psyche, but gee willikers! He’s really outdone himself with this look at the death of the American Dream.  His central villain is cunning, soulless, and seemingly unstoppable.  Seeing him slowly close in and circle Jack provides tension like a tightly wound string. 

 

Snyder and Tuft recreate the early 20^th century America and all its dangers very well.  The realistic setting helps ground the elements of the fantastic and make them feel all too real.  The use of string supporting characters that you grow to like is only a way to make it all the more terrifying when they are in mortal danger.  The art has a realistic quality that separates it from super hero fare and Futaki’s skill at expressing emotion on faces makes all the characters come to life quite vividly.  It makes all the difference, because a razor toothed old man could have ended up being a very silly image.  Instead he is a malevolent force of violence and death personified and a great addition to the annals of villainy.  This is an excellent comic book and a great bloody piece of intelligent horror fiction.  A great read for fans of either and so good that it could make converts of readers that think that horror or comics are beneath them. Just read it with the lights on…during the day…with someone else at home.

You can check our catalog for Severed here.