Review: "Anna Dressed in Blood" by Kendare Blake

Kendare Blake's "Anna Dressed in Blood" puts a neat spin on a familiar ghost-hunter story.

Cas is the hero of the story, a high school student who goes through the motions at each school he attends -- he knows he's going to spend his life killing ghosts, just like his (deceased) father, so a diploma is an afterthought. He moves around the country with his mother, taking care of ghosts in need of killing. He meets his match in Anna, a teenage girl who haunts the house she grew up in and who kills anyone to pass within the house's door. She's the strongest ghost he's ever fought, and though he's convinced he'll take her down eventually, he's surprised by how much he really doesn't want to. But the trouble in Thunder Bay may not be Anna after all, and Cas will need all the help he can get to figure out what's really going on.

First things first: Cas. The stereotypical hero in a story like this is a man (or a boy, as the case may be) who is a social misfit. He does what he does very well, but he has a hard time functioning in "normal" society and frequently has a tough time with the ladies. Cas, however, has got the high school social structure down pat. When he starts at a new school, he deliberately seeks out the most popular girl in school:

I need to be plugged into the social pipeline. I need to get people talking to me, so I can ask them questions that I need answers to. So when I transfer in, I always look for the queen bee.

Every school has one. The girl who knows everything and everybody. I could go and try to insta-bond with the lead jock, I suppose, but I've never been good at that. My dad and I never watched sports or played catch. I can wrestle the dead all day long, but touch football might knock me unconscious. Girls, on the other hand, have always come easy. I don't know why that is, exactly. Maybe it's the outsider vibe and a well-placed brooding look.

That self-assurance and confidence were a welcome change; I get tired of reading about the hero who longs to fit in. Cas was  comfortable with himself and the way his job took him out of the usual society. Later, that attitude went a ways toward explaining his attraction to Anna -- but I still had a hard time swallowing that. I mean -- she's a ghost. Cas has obviously lived a lonely life, but why he turns to the one girl with whom he absolutely cannot have a future, I'm not sure. (Spoiler-ish: I have to admit, I found the scene where Cas and Anna kiss to be icky. She's dead. Not to mention she's killed dozens of people.)

But the revelation and resolution of Anna's roots aren't the crux of this book; that honor goes to the mystery of the ghost that killed Cas' father. The developments here were nicely foreshadowed, and I particularly liked the way Blake developed the killer ghost. He was particularly creepy and suitably intimidating. Actually, many of the ghost- or horror-related scenes were well done; the part where Anna drops Cas into a basement full of rotting but sentient corpses is an excellent example.

The sequel, "Girl of Nightmares," came out Aug. 7. At $9.99 for the e-book, it's not an automatic pickup, but I'll keep my eyes on it and grab it if the price goes lower (or if the public library makes a copy available).

Review: "Quiver" by Holly Luhning

Oddly enough, "Quiver" makes two books in a row that mention Elizabeth Bathory. Or, as she's known in her native Hungarian and in Holly Luhning's book, Erzsébet Báthory.

Bathory, for those who haven't heard of her, is a 16th-century countess who is infamous for having tortured and killed hundreds of girls before she was arrested and bricked up in her castle, where she later died. "Quiver" is the story of a young woman who is fascinated — really, you could say obsessed — with Bathory. Danica is completing the last of her training as a clinical psychologist, a field she entered because of her interest in psychotics. She's managed to get herself a job a mental hospital in England, where she's assigned to work with a convicted murderer who claims to have killed his victim for Bathory. Danica's work there attracts the attention of an old acquaintance, Maria, who tempts Danica with what she says are pages from Bathory's diary. What Maria really wants is a more complicated question, and it's one that Danica will have no choice but to answer.

I was more than a little put off by Danica's interest in Bathory. The story doesn't work unless she's borderline obsessed, but it's still disconcerting how little the extent of the countess' cruelty and monstrosity bother her. She blames her interest on a supremely safe childhood:

I've never had an experience like that, something that gnawed at me in every pause and that changed the taste of things. I know I should be grateful, but I'm curious, envious to see what it's like to pass through a version of reality and to see your world differently than you are able to understand right now. Reading about Bathory didn't completely change me, but it spurred me, dug in just enough to encourage my curiosity of what it might be like to experience the horrific.

"Technically, I was fixated," she says later. For sure. When she reads scenes Maria sends her from Bathory's diary — scenes of unbelievable torture, total dismissal of the value of countless human lives — her reaction borders on aroused. (And, yes, there is a subtext of sexual tension between Danica and Maria, who resembles the countess in many ways.)

Without those diary scenes, this book would fall in line with the characters it describes, glorifying a woman who destroyed hundreds of lives and families simply because she could. With them, the reader is kept from buying into the warped adoration of Danica or, more so, Maria. (After I finished "Quiver," one of my first reactions was that no one would think of Bathory as Danica, Maria, and others in the book do. When I headed online to research some of the details of her story, however, I was shocked to find multiple sites whose authors defend her without denying her crimes. How sad.)

This isn't a book I'll be rushing to re-read, despite solid writing and editing. It certainly isn't uplifting, and the main character is both frustratingly obtuse and difficult to root for. If you enjoy horror and are a fan of movies such as "Hostel" or the "Saw" series (which I am not), you'll enjoy this book more than I did.