Against all odds, 17-year-old Gene has survived in a world where the general population has eaten humans to near extinction. The only remaining humans, or hepers as they are known, are housed in domes on the savannah and studied at the nearby Heper Institute. Every decade there is a government sponsored hunt.
When Gene is selected to be one of the combatants he must learn the art of the hunt – but also elude his fellow competitors as suspicions about his true nature grow…

My copy of The Hunt was an early Christmas present from Simon and Schuster at their December blogger event. To be honest it was the book I was most excited about, but cruel and lovely people that they are, they waited until the very end of the talk and presentation about their upcoming books to give each of us a carefully wrapped package containing one copy each of The Hunt by Andrew Fukuda.

This book will grab you by the throat on the first page with the monstrousness that happens – I will not tell you what it is but it is heart-breaking and wonderful in its savagery. Chapter one will hook you and you will not want to put this book down until you have read every page. I can tell you this because I know it to be true as I started the book on the bus way back in December as I was going to meet friends for a movie and dinner, I can remember everything about that evening as the book was in my pocket, and desire to run home and read it was nigh irresistible! Fortunately I was able to resist this need.
In the world of the Hunt the vampires are humanity’s apeptites unleashed – all the things that make us human – restraint, consideration for others, overcoming the desire to have another morsel once our hunger is sated – all those controls are absent. No sparkly, tortured souls that exist in the night these vampires – they are hunger and desire for human blood and flesh unrestrained.

I have heard people I know describe The Hunt as The Hunger Games with fangs – and it is not an inaccurate description, but for me the closest novel that I can compare it to is my favourite vampire novel of all time. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. Forget the movie versions starring Charlton Heston (The Omega man) and the newer flashier version with Will Smith, which up until the end was not too bad but they bowdlerised the ending – unforgiveable as I Am Legend is a timeless horror classic and now – in my mind at least it has a sequel.

A world where normal means fangs, an aversion to light and an unquenching thirst for the taste of Heper flesh and blood. A world where the few, uninfected that manage to live hidden amongst their predators must deny and hide their humanity to just survive.
For too long vampires have been the pop stars of the literary world, bright, beautiful and desirable. With The Hunt Andrew Fukuda takes them back to their bloody roots as hungry, monstrous beings – humanity’s apex predator! For that I thank him!

If I scored the books I read The Hunt would get a bloody 10 out of 10.

Buy it, read it and then tell your friends and like me you can wait, hungry for the sequel!

Jasper (Jazz) Dent is a likable teenager. A charmer, one might say.
But he’s also the son of the world’s most infamous serial killer and for Dear Old Dad, Take Your Son to Work Day was year-round. Jazz has witnessed crime scenes the way cops wish they could – from the criminal’s point of view.
And now bodies are piling up in Lobo’s Nod. In an effort to clear his name, Jazz joins the police in a hunt for a new serial killer but Jazz has a secret–could he be more like his father than anyone knows?

I started reading I Hunt Killers on the train home this evening, as the train pulled in to London Bridge Station and a young family walked past my seat I heard a little girl say “Mummy, Daddy I want to hunt killers! I… want… to… hunt… killers!” Her parents glanced at me sideways and carried on off the train taking the future detective with them.

I Hunt Killers as one of the best covers I have seen this year, well the American version does anyway, the British edition is not out yet. A black and white dust jacket the only colour provided by spots of blood, the cover itself is splashed with blood outlining a white silhouette lightly splashed with directional splatter, it is a thing of gory beauty to behold.

The true marvel lies within it’s pages, Barry Lyga has crafted a compelling tale of a boy who lives in fear that he may be just like his Dear Old Dad, one of the 21st century’s most prolific and horrific serial killers. Forget Hannibal Lecter and Dexter Morgan, Billy Dent is one of the most terrifying killers I have encountered in literary fictionover the past few years! He is notable by his absence throughout most of the book, but his malevolent influence is felt in every chapter.

Jazz is a likeable and sympathetic protagonist and we see the story unfolding through his eyes and thoughts. He is kept grounded through the loyalty and humour his best friend Howie and his girlfriend Connie – one of the few people who actually calls him out on often melodramatic and obsessive behaviour. The supporting cast is brilliant, his unpleasant grandmother – made worse by her creeping dementia, the town sherriff who captured Billy several years before, a social worker determined to do what is best for Jazxz whether he wants her to or not and a selection of suspects all mesh together perfectly.

I Hunt Killers is a brilliant beginning to what I hope is going to be a series of novels, I want to find out more about Jazz’s childhood and tutelage under Billy, and slowly unwrap the layers of mystery that were only hinted at in the pages of I Hunt Killers.

During a round of Truth or Dare, Abby Miller confesses her crush on Jake Chilson. The only people who know her secret are her friends at the sleepover – and whoever sent her a text message in the middle of the night warning her to stay away from Jake…or else!

As the night of the dance comes closer, some very creepy things start happening to Abby. Someone definitely wants to keep her away from Jake. Is it a jealous classmate or, as Abby begins to suspect, could it be a ghost?

Truth or Dare is the first novel in the Creepover series by P.J. Night, aimed at the tween or Middle Grade (MG) segment of the reading population. Truth or Dare is 160 pages in length, but don’t let the slenderness of the volume fool you, for it contains a wealth of jumps and creepy occurrences that kept me guessing until the end.

Truth or Dare twists like a serpent, from the genuinely spooky prologue to the final confrontation in a cemetery and a promise of more chills in the epilogue.

It put me in mind of some of the spooky films I watched as a child/early teen – creepy without being outright scary or terrifying but no less satisfying.

It is possible that the Creepover series is being written with an eye to a television series as I think it would work in a visual medium, in terms of spookiness is more John Carpenter than Wes Craven with flashes of spookiness rather than full on horror.

Based on this book, I can see the series being extremely popular. Spooky enough to keep younger readers enaged but without being scary enough to upset parents or more sensitive readers.

I already have a plan to use Truth or Dare as my spooky read for Hallowe’en in my library. I will read two chapters a day during lunch break or after school for the year 7 & 8 reading groups with added special effects starting with the prologue & chapter one on Monday 22nd October I will finish with chapter 14 & the epilogue on All Hallows Eve.

This is a world of the future, a world of oppression, a world run on the strict rules of the toxic T.R.E.A.C.L.E. regime – Training and Resources for Educating Adolescent Children in a Loving Environment.

In writing Toxic Treacle Echo Freer has taken some of the most prevalent problems facing youth in the UK today and placing it in a future not too far removed from our time.

Single-parent families, state intervention in the raising of children and bloody youth violence on the streets. Toxic Treacle is a very British take on the Dystopian genre with lashings of biting satire.

Using teminology that could only have been dreamt up by a committee of spin doctors we have pre-breeders and pre-nurturers (teens), Nurturers (mothers) known as movs in this strange new world, Breeders and Providers the fathers whose only purpose is to provide genetic material for up to three children before going on to lives of work and play.

Monkey is 15 and only weeks away from becoming a Breeder, he cannot wait to move on from his gang-related lifestyle to live the life of his dreams, breeding with Angel and then moving on to becoming a pro-footballer. Lofty goals that many young men of today would wish to emulate. Monkey is a typical teen, desiring male companionship and confused about his feelings for Anel and fears that she will not reciprocate.

When his friend Trevor ‘Tragic’ disappears after a gang fight, Monkey starts to see beyond what the rulers of this new Britain want him to see and starts to understand that there is more to life than his selfish dreams and desires will offer him.

Toxic Treacle is brilliant! Offering believable male and female protagonists and a shift away from plucky freedom fighters rebelling against a monolithic totalitarian state (although there is some of that too). This is a novel about choices, the meaning of love, family and society and change, a change that comes not from a sacrificial figurehead but from ordinary people standing up and demanding change with the ballot not the bullet.

This is also a rare teenage love story told from the boys perspective.

Meet Blade. But be careful. You may not like what you see. He’s dangerous. He needs to be. Because there people who want him dead.

It’s dog eat dog in his world. Win or die. He thought he was safe. But now they’ve found out where is. And they’re coming.

I will just state for the record that I am a massive Tim Bowler fan. I love what he does with ordinary words – he puts them together in such a way that they weave a compelling narrative that sucks you in keeps you gripped to the very end.

I am by nature a law-abiding citizen, I have respect for the organs of state and that includes the police force. Yet by the close of the first chapter of Enemies, I had developed such a hatred of the policeman that was grilling a young Blade in the lock up that I was hoping he would get shanked. In five pages Mr Bowler made me identify with a seven year-old and turned me into a police-hating Blade fan.

The rest of the book was even better! Terse, exciting prose with a protagonist that broke the fourth wall and addresses the reader throughout the novel, cluing us in to what he is doing and why. It is quite possible that blade is an unreliable narrator, he openly admits to being a liar and gives us the choice to follow him or wig out and let him go his own way.

We have all seen or know teenagers like Blade, hard, solitary beings who want or need no-one, at least on the surface. Enemies lets us in to Blade’s thoughts and shows us his distrust and loneliness. Enemies is a brilliant set-up to a series, Blade has many powerful enemies but we do not know who they are or why they are following him, we do not even know who he really is or what he has done.

Enemies is noir for teenagers, Blade is no Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe but he has his own moral code and although his instincts warn against it he cannot turn away a damsel in distress even though the forces arrayed against him are cast and powerful.

Enemies is the beginning of an epic quest set against the dirty streets of a modern world, where a boy must stand alone to stay free and battle against his darker instincts that threaten to drag him down!

Enemies was previously published in two parts as Blade: Playing Dead and Blade: Closing In.

When Mara Dyer wakes up in hospital with no memory of how she got there, or any explanation as to why the bizarre accident that caused the death of her boyfriend and two best friends left her mysteriously unharmed, her doctors suggest she start over in anew city, at a new school, and just hope her memories gradually come back.

But Mara’s new start is anything but comforting. She sees the faces of her dead friends everywhere and now she’s started to see other people’s deaths before they happen. Is she going crazy? As if dealing with this isn’t enough, Noah Shaw, the most beautiful boy she’s ever seen, can’t seem to leave her alone. But does he have her best interest at heart, or another agenda altogether.
 
 
    
 
 
 

When I was a child (many years ago now) one year my family and I went on holiday to a camp site on the bank of a river. I was swimming one afternoon when a slow current caught me, I was a fair distance down river when I finally noticed what was happening I was unable to swim strongly enough against the current and was helpless in its grip. Reading The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer was like that, I was reading lazily and all of a sudden I was gripped and unable to put it down, and unlike my episode in the river, there was no-one that plunged in to drag me back to the bank.

I must admit that I judged this book by its cover! When I saw it at the Simon and Schuster offices I thought oooh pretty! and was fortunate enough to wheedle a copy, the cover of Mara Dyer is one that I would have liked to have had as a poster when I was a teenager. Usually with most of the books I have read, the cover image has had something to do with the story but the only connection is the ethereal, otherworldly style that suffuses the story.

I can honestly say that I was very confused throughout the entire novel, trying to figure out if it was a paranormal tale or not. Even at the end when things are supposed to become clearer as to what was going on it left me guessing!

I will say that my confusion and inability to work out if what was happening was real or in her head in no way impacted on my enjoyment.

I do know for a fact that I will be picking up volume two so I can find out what happens next!

The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer is a beautiful novel that reads like a dream!