Hellishly hilarious.
High school in Hell? Not so different from high school anywhere else.
Playing his premise for all it's worth, Guarente fills the halls of St. Lucifer’s Academy for the Hopeless and Damned with heavy-lidded teen dead and demons. There, the former serve as lab subjects in dissection class, are forced to watch sex-ed films featuring their own parents and otherwise endure like high-pain activities. For Trevor, the thick protective shells of ennui and self-loathing that he brought with him after being electrocuted by a crappy guitar amp begin to break down when slavering vice principal Cerberus promises a transfer to Purgatory if he can pull his “soul point average” up past 3.0 (it’s currently negative 2.8 billion). But then leaving starts to look less attractive when hot new goth student Persephone Plumm shows signs of interest. That interest leads to a clinch after Trevor crashes the school’s angst rally to play a “neo thrash core” ballad…but the course of true love is unlikely to run smooth, as Persephone has yet to share some significant information about her parentage. Being replete with disfigured students, terrifying monsters and scenes of gruesomely explicit torture, the art is as much fun as the broadly tweaked school-story tropes. (Said art is supplied by a rotating team, leading to some visual discontinuity from section to section.)
Hellishly hilarious. (Graphic fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62873-592-5
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
Not much forward momentum but a tasty array of chills, thrills, and chortles.
The victory of Jacob and his fellow peculiars over the previous episode’s wights and hollowgasts turns out to be only one move in a larger game as Riggs (Tales of the Peculiar, 2016, etc.) shifts the scene to America.
Reading largely as a setup for a new (if not exactly original) story arc, the tale commences just after Jacob’s timely rescue from his decidedly hostile parents. Following aimless visits back to newly liberated Devil’s Acre and perfunctory normalling lessons for his magically talented friends, Jacob eventually sets out on a road trip to find and recruit Noor, a powerful but imperiled young peculiar of Asian Indian ancestry. Along the way he encounters a semilawless patchwork of peculiar gangs, syndicates, and isolated small communities—many at loggerheads, some in the midst of negotiating a tentative alliance with the Ymbryne Council, but all threatened by the shadowy Organization. The by-now-tangled skein of rivalries, romantic troubles, and family issues continues to ravel amid bursts of savage violence and low comedy (“I had never seen an invisible person throw up before,” Jacob writes, “and it was something I won’t soon forget”). A fresh set of found snapshots serves, as before, to add an eldritch atmosphere to each set of incidents. The cast defaults to white but includes several people of color with active roles.
Not much forward momentum but a tasty array of chills, thrills, and chortles. (Horror/Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-3214-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Those obsessed with paranormals won't dislike anything here, but everyone else should give it a miss
Boy meets Girl. Boy turns out to have a deep—nay, otherworldly—connection to Girl despite being the loneliest member of a family of immortal, sexy, good-hearted monsters.
Newly-orphaned Brooklynite Kate Mercier is now living in Paris with her grandparents and sister. She's grateful for anything that breaks the constant tyranny of her depression, even the weird obsession she's developing with Vincent, a hot Parisian she's seen in her favorite café. Vincent is equally obsessed with Kate, but after a few dates his secret is revealed: Vincent is a revenant, driven by some mystical force to give his life to save others again and again, constantly reborn as an 18 year old with rippling "rock-hard abdominal muscles." Along with his revenant family (one father figure, several extremely sexy pseudo-brothers and a teenage girl to be Kate's friend), he rescues at-risk Parisians while fighting off the revenant's evil counterparts among the undead. Kate and Vincent are, of course, drawn to each other, miserable with despair when apart. When they are together, it takes all Vincent's willpower not to molest his beloved; readers of Twilight and its ilk know the drill. But wait! Evil is afoot, and perhaps it will spice up their love life!
Those obsessed with paranormals won't dislike anything here, but everyone else should give it a miss . (Paranormal romance. 12-14)Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-200401-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperTeen
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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