Flutterby™! : Black Fall

I suck at writing reviews. I also have a gazillion books queued up on my Kindle app because in one place or another I ran into some author and ended up with a book list too long to read. Many of those books are first novels, a little rusty around the edges, flat prose. For some reason, many of those books are also horror, which is a genre I'm coming to appreciate, but really isn't my primary love.

So I kept scrolling back and forth across the very dark cover of Black Fall, and after an exchange on Twitter with the author said "okay, it's time to crack this one open."

I'm glad I did. Here's the review I posted on Amazon for him:

It'd be really easy for a "teenager discovers he's got a secret legacy" story to become trite and predictable, but Black Fall had me at werewolves making Little Red Riding Hood jokes. It deals with the necessary angst of a teenage protagonist without wallowing in it. The metaphorical mechanism for mental struggles against other vampires works really well.

I was afraid that this was going to be a "vampire and werewolves as horror" tale, but even as the stakes are raised to threatening large regions (and as the series continues, I'm sure the fate of the very world will be at stake), it continues to be a personal tale, with a flawed likable protagonist making smart (and appropriate to his character) decisions with the information he has.

The language flows well. The action flows well. The exposition is believable. I thought I was over "teen discovers he's special" stories, but sign me up for the series!