A proficient mix of bloodsuckers and quiet romance.
A modern-day vampire develops feelings for a human in Harrison’s supernatural debut.
Vampire Simon maintains a low profile among the thousands attending the University of Illinois at Chicago. His kind are a secret from humans, so he never hunts UIC students and keeps social interactions to a minimum. Yet he’s uncharacteristically drawn to sophomore transfer Anita Rothard. He fights his urge to feed when they’re together, and the two grow close but avoid the word date. Anita’s father, however, disapproves of their budding relationship, believing there’s “something off” about Simon. While she’s reluctant to side with her strict, Catholic dad, Anita admits she knows little about her new suitor. Elsewhere, Shafax, the powerful “King of Vampires,” arrives in the U.S. and makes a beeline for Chicago. He seeks the blood of Salem, another vampire, who’s apparently killed Shafax’s minions. Now the King of Vampires plans to mete out his lethal plan on his own—an encounter Salem narrowly survives. Salem has no choice but to turn to Simon for help. These two have fought for years, but Salem believes that only as a team can they defeat Shafax. While Simon struggles to keep his world hidden from Anita, Shafax drags the couple into his personal war, all in an effort to draw out his true target. This entails the fearsome vampire threatening one of Anita’s loved ones, which only makes the capable woman want to join the fight against him.
Harrison’s story boasts a sublimely understated relationship. Simon’s romance with Anita is an effective slow burn; he’s wary of “human emotion,” and she has trouble defining their relationship, probably because of her overbearing, religious father. Though readers may see parallels to a popular vampire-teen romance series, the vampirism, as well as the romance, is often subtle. There’s not much on the vamps’ backstories, with a mere hint of Simon’s mysterious origin. Similarly, the story adheres to genre conventions, including bat transformations, aversion to garlic, and crucifixes charring vampiric skin. Harrison fleshes out the characters, such as certain humans who become Shafax’s unfortunate victims. While Simon and Anita make an engaging couple, Salem is the most memorable. He’s cynical, charming, and he flippantly calls Anita “Breakfast,” “Snack Food,” or Simon’s “pet human.” A snowy Chicago is well portrayed: “The light wind blew snowflakes into swirling patterns around Anita as she stared over the side of the bascule bridge into the Chicago River below. A rusted red truss separated the sidewalk from the street, although some passing cars honked and a few kicked up slush in their wake.” The narrative unfolds around Christmas, stirring up Anita’s questions of family and religion. Despite hefty character development, there’s plentiful action, especially in the novel’s latter half. These scenes, spotlighting multiple characters in peril, favor suspense over graphic depictions of vampire-related violence. The ending resolves some of the story, though Harrison clearly has a sequel in the works.
A proficient mix of bloodsuckers and quiet romance.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A wonderfully weird horror romance that requires an acquired taste and a strong stomach.
A shapeshifting monster finds love with a human whose family hopes to exterminate her kind in this mix of fantasy, horror, and romance.
Shesheshen’s yearly hibernation is interrupted when a group of monster hunters disrupts the makeshift nest she’s made in the bowels of a ruined manor. She typically takes the form of an amorphous blob, but quick thinking leads her to construct a more humanoid appearance to trick the nosy hunters. Her hard work, constructing a new body from the remains of past feasts, isn’t convincing enough, and she’s driven off a cliff to her death. Her saving grace comes in the form of Homily, who nurses Shesheshen back to health, fully believing the alien creature is simply a young woman just like her. Homily’s nurturing ministrations cause Shesheshen to feel something foreign to her: love. However, Shesheshen begins to realize that her version of love doesn’t quite align with the very human Homily’s. Shesheshen wants to be honest with Homily and reveal her true form, until Homily confides that she’s a monster hunter of sorts, determined to seek revenge on a shapeshifter who cursed her family. In the realm of monster romances, Shesheshen is quite physically different from the typical humanoid love interests. For example, the book’s title is a direct reflection of the way Shesheshen initially wants to communicate her affection for Homily: by injecting the woman with her eggs until the young hatch and inevitably eat her from the inside. Shesheshen makes for an interesting narrator, as readers experience these new feelings and sensations right along with her. Seeing her find ways to describe and parse new emotions like friendship and love is often more interesting than the romance itself. Referring to this merely as both an opposites-attract and a secret-enemies-to-lovers romance doesn’t quite encapsulate the bizarro narrative that debut novelist Wiswell has created. While inventive enough to push the boundaries of romance and dark fantasy, this may appeal mainly to niche genre-fiction fans.
A wonderfully weird horror romance that requires an acquired taste and a strong stomach.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780756418854
Page Count: 320
Publisher: DAW
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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