Dan Padavona

Dan Padavona is a relatively new writer, but I was wowed with the high level of his writing. This novel seems as if it was written by a novelist who had been doing this for a few decades. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what makes the writing so good, but much of it was the description, putting phrases together, the right word choice. Perhaps it was a combination of all of these things and more. Regardless, the story flowed great and was a pleasure to read.

As for the story itself, vampires emerge in a Virginia town. Almost overnight, they take over the town of Storberry. A group of survivors emerge, who learn of the secret of the predators in the town. The survivors are a mixed bag, but generally represent the best of what the town has to offer. There are two teens—both intelligent and resilient in the face of serious adversity. Evan, who returns to the town after having moved on and has a history with the vampire presence in the town. Renee the librarian, a vet, a police officer, and the owner of a café. They learn what works against the vampire, but all the same, the odds of their survival once they get cut off from the outside world are pretty slim. All they have is each other and their resourcefulness to make it out alive and protect the rest of the town from the vampire invasion.

There were a couple of slow spots in the novel, and some sections that could have been trimmed, but otherwise this was a very enjoyable novel. Even before the vampire invasion starts, I was thoroughly engrossed by the characters’ backstories and the general characterization, which I found to be one of the real strong suits of this novel. The action and the logic the characters used was well thought out. This was a well-written novel that I would highly recommend.

Carl Alves - author of Blood Street… (mehr)

This is a decent serial killer-type horror novel that is very obviously inspired by the works of Richard Laymon, though without the sex and a lot less gore than you'd find in the typical Laymon novel. It's about a man who finds a young woman hiding in the backseat of his car. At first he thinks she's a corpse, but realizes his mistake when she jumps out of the car. He becomes a bit obsessed with her, and eventually tracks her down to discover that she's homeless and sleeps in other people's houses while they're on vacation. When he gets evicted from his apartment, the pair stay together, eventually ending up in a creepy foreclosed house in the middle of nowhere, which just happens to be the lair of a serial killer. I enjoyed it, but do think it was a bit slow at points.… (mehr)

I picked up this short horror novel because it was cheap and had a blurb from one of my favorite writers. It's about a guy who moves into a cheap apartment with a woman after she rescues him when he has a very nasty bicycle accident. It turns out that there has been a series of unexplained murders in the complex, which is consequently mostly vacant, and all the apartments are linked by a crawlspace, whose entrance is hidden in the bedroom closets. Naturally our heroes find the crawlspace, go exploring, and have to fight off the crazed killers.

It's not bad, but I thought the penultimate chapter, where the bulk of the action took place, was a bit of a letdown, and its chronology didn't seem to workout. Still it's a fun read for fans of slasher films and the like.… (mehr)