100 by 30 Book 14

The Demonata Series #1: Lord Loss by Darren Shan

I'm gonna be honest here. I was looking for a short book in the young adult section to help get me caught up, and they didn't have the first book in the Cirque Du Freak series, which Darren Shan also wrote. So I ended up with this book. If you want uneven character development, sloppy storytelling, and buckets of goo, this is the book for you. Given the hype this author had gotten in the past, I was shocked at how poorly this is written.

The book starts off with a protagonist who can't figure out what's messed up about chopping up dead rats and hiding them in his sister's towel. Then something really messed up happens and our young hero ends up in a psyche ward. Not that you could blame him. The shocking violence of the events that put him there give you a lot of sympathy for him. If the book had any commitment to real emotion, he'd stay in the mental hospital for years, if not forever. But nope, his long slow recovery from seeing a horrific triple homicide takes less than six months. That sounds about right for a 15 year-old to get over seeing his family sliced to pieces and used as puppets by demons...I was going to give a spoiler alert, but this book really isn't worth your time.

Anyway, a weird rich uncle brings him to live at his mansion in the country where he does charming things like mock this kids PTSD. Then our hero (his name is Grubbs) meets some annoying sidekick type named Bill-E and they waste 130 pages of a 220 page book not telling us what the heck is going on. They don't even mention the event that brought him here that much. It's like this kid just forgot that his family was slaughtered by demons. Then these two geniuses think that Grubbs' uncle is a werewolf (he's not) and they investigate that for awhile... Long story short, Grubbs family is cursed with Lyncanthropy (werewolf desease!) and the only way to cure it is to beat the Demon master Lord Loss at 5 games of chess. Yes, even when you add demons, magic, and sword fighting, chess is still incredibly boring. This book will make you wish you got knocked out by the Chess pieces in the first Harry Potter book so you don't have to sit through this whole thing.

3/10