Review: "Zero Sight" by B. Justin Shier

"Zero Sight" will inevitably draw comparisons to Harry Potter and, to a lesser extent, Twilight. Like Harry Potter, it's a story of a boy from an unhappy home who goes away to school to be trained in the working of magic. Like Twilight, it's a story about two young adults who find themselves drawn to each other — except one of them is a vampire.

Whether those similarities make "Zero Sight" more or less appealing will likely depend on how you felt about Potter and Twilight. For the record, I enjoyed the Harry Potter series, I didn't make it past the first Twilight book, and I really liked this book.

In "Zero Sight," we're introduced to Dieter Resnick, a high school senior (and, unbeknownst to him, a latent mage) who's driven to get out of Las Vegas and away from his abusive drunk of a father. He's pinned his hopes for the future on college, so when he gets an offer from the elite Elliot College, Dieter's moving to Connecticut. On his way, he meets with Rei, a strange but beautiful young woman who winds up saving his life — and who turns out to be both a vampire and a classmate of his. The two of them will have their hands full, dealing with attacks on their college by a mysterious group of counter-mages. It's a good thing they've formed a bond.

Dieter struggles with his attraction to Rei. She's beautiful, yes, but she's a vampire. To Dieter's credit, he's disgusted by her nature, and he has a hard time reconciling his feelings toward her with the fact that she drinks human blood. She suffers no conflicts about her nature, though, and it's refreshing, after the recent trend of vampires-as-tortured-sex-symbols-with-special-dietary-
needs.

"It's just weird. Here we are, talking normally, but I'd have expected your kind to be amoral killing machines. Lestat-style, you know?"

Rei cocked her head and the blue faded from her eyes. "That would be a very healthy assumption to make." She gazed into me, and my heartbeat started to race in reply. Rei's face had changed. The softness was gone. It looked like it was etched out of marble rather than flesh. She was cold. Lifeless. The voice that leaked out of her lips was devoid of humanity. The melodic timber was gone, replaced by that silky hiss. I could hardly draw breath, and an unreasonable terror clamped down on my body. An ancient part of my brain yelled shrilly: That predator. You prey. Back the fuck off.

"Zero Sight" is an excellent start to a series. The writing is good, and though the book could use another read-through by a proof reader, the occasional errors weren't glaring enough to detract from the reading. The secondary characters are just getting fleshed out by the end of the book, as is the system of magic, but both promise to be handled well in future entries.

The book ends on a cliffhanger, and I bought the sequel right away. Guess what's coming next week.

Review: "The Ghosts of Varner Creek" by Michael Weems

When I purchased "The Ghosts of Varner Creek," I thought I was buying a ghost story in the traditional (read: horror) sense. That, it's not - despite a very creepy hotel room encounter with a ghost early on - but I'm having a hard time pegging it. Amazon's description calls it "a southern Gothic tale of a paranormal mystery," and that's pretty close, though I would argue that it's a regular mystery with some paranormal aspects.

However you want to categorize Michael Weems' novel, you'll have to admit one thing: This is an excellent, if at times heartbreaking, story about the way one family self-destructs and the secrets left behind.

The narrator, Sol, grows up in the small town of Varner Creek with his parents and his older sister, Sarah, who has Down syndrome. His parents' marriage isn't a happy one - not surprising, considering it's rooted in date rape - and so when Sol's mother, Annie, and Sarah disappear the day after Sarah's birthday, not many are surprised. Sol is, though, and he isn't the only one wondering about their disappearance.

How Sol deals with the emotional aftermath of his mother's disappearance, his father's emotional and physical abuse and, yes, his unexpected ability to see ghosts makes for an engrossing read. It's not always comfortable, but given the subject matter, that's appropriate.

What hooked me early on (after I realized what kind of book this was not) is the way Weems wrote Sol's discovery that his mother and sister have vanished. Weems nails the way a young boy would react to being left with a parent who terrifies him by the parent he loves. Confusion, denial, self-blame - it's achingly easy to imagine Sol's emotion state:

No, no she couldn't have, I though. She wouldn't do that to me. Oh, God, I thought. Why didn't I wake up? Why didn't she wake me up, too, and take me with her? How could I not have heard her. She must have been rummaging all through the dresser for the clothes and even Sarah had gotten up without me hearing her. If I had woken up maybe she would have taken me with her.

The writing is generally very good. Weems skirts the line of overly cutesy with some countrified spellings - "yah" instead of yeah, "diller" instead of armadillo, etc. - but it was kept within reason. 

I don't normally enjoy novels like this one; I prefer escapist fiction, where the harm people do to each other is sufficiently removed from my reality. In spite of that, I made it through "The Ghosts of Varner Creek" in a little more than a day. It's worth reading.