I loved the Cirque Du Freak series. I decided to read this on a whim and bought it at Barnes and Noble yesterday. I at first was going through the whole "author wrote another book thing" again like I did with Bitter End. But I was impressed.
Grubbs was a pretty realistic kid, but I could tell this series was written in 2005 (who says coolio?) and that he lived in England (no one in America constantly says bloody unless they're reading the "Bloody Hell!" line from Hellsing). I also don't know anything about chess and I can barely play a decent game of checkers (but Monopoly, oh man be afraid when I play Monopoly, especially The Simpsons edition). I wasn't grossed out, I've seen way worse because I'm a horror movie freak (and I happen to think Michael is lame). This just sounded like a cheap budget horror movie that I could have seen nestled in with The Village of the Damned and Children of the Corn in the five dollar bin at Walmart Saturday morning. I was also hoping this wouldn't be the whole "good demon loves someone" shit either. It seems all the teen demons today are Hellboy ripoffs. But this was original- I'm glad about that!
This is the kind of freaky stuff I'm into. You can understand why Shan's amazingly gory descriptions didn't faze me. But they definitely kept me hooked! Great song, by the way.
What happened to Grubs, wow. The descriptions were great and well written. As crazy as parts of the plot was (for a while I was wondering where the werewolf plot was actually going to go to), it was thought out. I liked how the mansion was described, the pictures of the werewolves, the demons, and the characters. Dervish and Bill-E were cool and I liked Meera. They were interesting and human. They weren't stereotypical and all had their own special place.
The plot was very quick and though it kept me hooked, I feel it could have been longer. We could have gotten to know the characters more and the ending wouldn't have been so rushed.
Like Cirque, the supernatural aspects are well thought out. Lord Loss was both hard to understand and so riveting. I wonder why he actually eats people's sadness because in the end it's just, uh, sad. The other demons are easily stuff I imagine from all my creepo stuff, but still very cool. I could read their descriptions a bunch and yet still think over in my head how they look. Sometimes that bugs me in other books but it worked well in this.
There's definitely a distinct voice in this book and the next ones. I know it'll have different narrators and I can tell from the little chapter for the next book at the end the voices are distinct which most authors fail at. I'm going crazy to read Demon Thief!
4 stars. Sorry the review's so short. It seems as if whenever I read a good book I have a short review and when I have a bad book it's the dictionary. *Sigh*
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