A well-crafted deconstruction of dystopian vampire tropes with style and class.
In Taylor’s horror-series starter, an awkward young man and an arachnophobic classmate struggle to survive a vampire apocalypse.
The business of vengeance can hollow out the soul—but sometimes it can jump-start an affirmation of one’s humanity, as the Providence, Rhode Island, teenagers in Taylor’s dystopian vampire adventure learn on the eve of the Everton High School prom. However, the foreboding started long ago for Monty Smith, who can’t parse the meaning of his persistent nightmares about a giant spider, even after he rescues Sofia, his classmate with a deep fear of the insects, from a black widow in class. Sofia, for her part, can’t understand why she’s so strongly disturbed by a hearse she sees driving around the city. She has a good reason for her feelings, as she and her classmates discover, because the hearse contains Vampress, leader of Dell’Ombra, a secret organization of beings that “conspire in shadows to cast gloom upon the world.” The group, led by Vampress’ maniacal second-in-command, Vincenzo, soon unleashes an attack on the locals that leaves Monty, his prom date Cindy, and Sofia and other classmates running for their lives and struggling to make sense of a world turned upside down: “Vampires cover the place—crawling on the walls, hanging from the ceiling, crouched on the floor.” Monty and his friends soon discover that Vampress is the living reincarnation of Amelia Montgomery, a young woman who initially died in the 1880s. But the new world in which they live isn’t one in which knowledge offers immediate power; they still have a long battle ahead of them.
As the story goes on, Monty, in particular, must make a series of terrible choices—which person to rescue, which one to leave behind—if the group is to have any hope of navigating their ever-shifting, dangerous new circumstances. The story effectively makes use of multiple first-person points of view—from the feral brutality of Vincenzo and his powerful boss (“We have a singular goal: to flip the world on its head. Good will be punished; evil will be rewarded”) to Monty’s struggles with his domineering aunt and his abusive past: “That’s how her brother—my late father—looked at me before beating me to the brink of death.” This sort of cross-cutting enables Taylor to weave his characters’ inner turmoil into broader themes: notably, how humankind can fight a natural world that seems to have turned on them. The final takeaway is about accepting the reality of change in all its cold, hard finality, as Monty does; he acknowledges a tragic loss, and he tells Sofia how she allowed him to understand that loss’s implications: “She was everything to me. She still is, but she can’t be my lifeline. No one can. I needed to find purpose inside myself, and you helped me do that.” It’s one of many fine instances of nuanced storytelling that will stick with readers long after they’ve turned the final page.
A well-crafted deconstruction of dystopian vampire tropes with style and class.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2025
ISBN: 9798993296401
Page Count: 418
Publisher: Sable Tales
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An impressive and surprising take on war-story tropes.
A doughboy makes a curious discovery at the front in this inventive metaphysical horror tale.
This novel by Kraus centers on Private Cyril Bagger, a U.S. soldier during World War I and the son of a bishop who died on the Lusitania; he’s taken his father’s Bible with him into the Army as a remembrance. He’s also a confidence man and shirker relegated to burial duty in the French countryside, which is fine with him: The work is grotesque (Kraus depicts wartime deaths in visceral detail) but keeps him from becoming a corpse himself. Alas, his commander has hand-picked him and four other “disreputable” soldiers for a suicide mission to rescue what sounds like an incessantly shrieking soldier. Cyril finds the source of the shrieking, which turns out to be—well, that’s tricky. Cyril sees her as a vaguely familiar woman, clothed in red and blue, bathed in bright light, and capable of magically rescuing him from the worst of German gunfire; members of his cohort see a mother, a former lover, and other women. So for the purposes of Kraus’ novel, the shrieker is a metaphor for the ways war stands in contrast to our deepest needs for care and safety. It’s a sweet sentiment, albeit one that Kraus coats in a lot of ugliness, particularly the seemingly endless human carnage. Kraus structures the novel as an extended run-on sentence (with paragraph breaks), giving the story a relentless and intense rhythm. As a veteran horror writer, he’s gifted at depictions of blood and guts and knows how to keep a story moving, but in its latter stages the novel is a philosophical one as well, concerned with humanity’s seemingly inborn need to wage war and what might counter it. The identity of the woman Cyril calls an angel is vague, but Kraus has a clear grasp on our worst impulses.
An impressive and surprising take on war-story tropes.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781668068458
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
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