A rampantly over-the-top saga of vampire royalty, tyranny and treachery with bite.
A tormented teenage boy is both pawn and Messiah in the centuries-old feud between powerful vampire clans ruling the world.
Author and filmmaker Amaret forgoes half-measures in this global vampire epic. Human history has been shaped by the long-living nocturnal bloodsuckers, whose origins date back to ancient Atlantis (and, it’s unsubtly suggested, to aliens before that). Empires, corporations, religion, the media—the vampires control it all, and they’re violently rushing toward the apocalyptic culmination of their bloody, ancient battle. Julian, a smart, sensitive but disadvantaged Hispanic teen in modern-day New York City, is a “chosen one” type; after his single-mom’s scheduled slaying, he’s abducted into an elite “rookery” that schools potential young vampires for future domination. But inconsolable, suicidal Julian fails to realize how high the stakes are until it’s nearly too late. In the looming vamp-Armageddon, Julian gets an unlikely rescuer in the rebel retinue of Vlad Tepes—aka Dracula. There, the narrative takes one of its few deep breaths during Julian’s intense training. Like Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy—but without the apparent satirical bend—the story appears to occur on an alternate Earth where every conspiracy theory holds true: the Bermuda Triangle is a cloudy, quasi-military experiment; Queen Elizabeth II controls the illegal drug trade and had a hand in Princess Diana’s assassination; most Jews aren’t true Jews, but the real ones used the Holocaust to eradicate the false ones. Some amendments to reality are in questionable taste. Aside from the brooding, self-doubting hero, the rest of the predatory nosferatu ensemble all seem to come in two flavors—bad guys and really, really bad guys—each more sinister and brazenly sadistic than the last. Yet the sheer audacity of Amaret’s blood-soaked plotting carries the book, all the way to a climax hinting at a sequel stirring restlessly in the grave.
A rampantly over-the-top saga of vampire royalty, tyranny and treachery with bite.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0983197195
Page Count: 530
Publisher: Creative House Int'l
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Imperfect, but well constructed and engrossing nonetheless.
Cerúlia recovers from her wounds and decides it’s finally time to take back her throne in Kozloff’s (The Queen of Raiders, 2020, etc.) penultimate Nine Realms novel.
Badly burned and laid up in a Healing Center, Cerúlia is losing faith in herself. She misses the various friends she’s made along her journey, misses her home, and resents her limitations as she heals from injuries sustained in the previous novel. In the past, her magical “Talent” for talking to animals has helped her make friends with local creatures, but she’s worried that something has happened to her ability and fears using it. As she slowly recuperates and learns from the fellow residents in the healing center, Cerúlia comes to understand that she must face her responsibility to her people and find a way to become the Queen of Weirandale. To that end, she returns home to her nation’s capital, Cascada, only to discover that her long-lost foster sister, Percia, is about to marry the kindly son of the maniacal and power-hungry Regent Matwyck, the very person keeping Cerúlia from her throne. Reunited with her beloved foster family, Cerúlia decides it is time to stop hiding under aliases and disguises. But with no army to support her, how is she supposed to save herself from Matwyck’s clutches? And now that she’s seen more of the world and understands the lives of regular people, does she even believe in the idea of monarchy at all? Kozloff finally brings the action back to Weirandale in a compelling setup to the last novel in her series. Like Book 2, this one struggles a bit with standing on its own, but Kozloff uses these pages to make Cerúlia a more complex and compelling character. Threads following other characters from other nations are easy to follow and add dimension to the world, but as of now they still feel a bit too detached from the main plotline.
Imperfect, but well constructed and engrossing nonetheless.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-16866-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
An engrossing and fast-paced read that doesn’t hit the mark it aims for.
The relationship between a young debtor and the trillionaire who owns him serves as a parable for the ills of capitalism.
Debut novelist Szpara imagines an only slightly more dystopian United States than the one that exists today, in which the wealth gap has grown so large that the country is more or less split into trillionaires and debtors. Debtors inherit their family's debt, increasing it exponentially over time. To pay it off, many sign up to become slaves for a predetermined amount of time, with the “choice” to inject a drug called Dociline that turns them into a kind of blissful zombie who has no memory, pain, or agency for the duration of their term. The drug is supposed to wear off within two weeks, but when Elisha Wilder’s mother returned from her debt-paying term, it never did, leaving her docile indefinitely. To resolve the rest of his family’s debt, Elisha becomes a Docile to none other than Alex Bishop, the CEO of the company that manufactures Dociline. He invokes his right to refuse the drug, one of the only Dociles ever to do so. Alex enacts a horrifying period of brainwashing in order to modify Elisha’s behavior to mimic that of an “on-med.” The resulting relationship between them is disturbing. As Alex wakes up to his complicity in a broken system—“I am Dr. Frankenstein and I’ve fallen in love with my own monster”—he becomes more sympathetic, for better or worse. As Elisha suffers not only brainwashing, rape, and abuse, but the recovery that must come after, his love for—fixation with, dependence on—Alex poses interesting questions about consent: “Being my own person hurts too much….Why should an opportunity hurt so much?” However, despite excellent pacing and a gripping narrative, Szpara fails to address the history of slavery in America—a history that is race-based and continues to shape the nation. This is a story with fully realized queer characters that is unafraid to ask complicated questions; as a parable, it functions well. But without addressing this important aspect of the nation and economic structures within which it takes place, it cannot succeed in its takedown of oppressive systems.
An engrossing and fast-paced read that doesn’t hit the mark it aims for.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21615-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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