Reign of Blood Book Review

Reign of Blood 

Alexia Purdy 

Indie Inked  

1/5 Stars  

    Here’s a summary for you,”"Never tease anything that wants to eat you. My name is April Tate and my blood is the new gold. Vampires and hybrids have overrun my world, once vibrant with life, but now a graveyard of death shrouded in shadows. I fight to survive; I fight for my mother and brother. The journey is full of turns that I am quite unprepared for. And I'm just hoping to make it to the next Vegas sunrise..." In a post-apocalyptic world, a viral epidemic has wiped out most of the earth’s population, leaving behind few humans but untold numbers of mutated vampires. April is a seventeen-year-old girl who lives in the remains of Las Vegas one year after the outbreak. She has become a ferocious vampire killer and after her family is abducted, she goes searching for them. What she finds is a new breed of vampire, unlike any she has seen before. Unsure of whom she can trust, she discovers that her view of the world is not as black and white as she once thought, and she's willing to bend the rules to rescue her family. But in trying to save them, she may only succeed in bringing her fragile world crashing down around her.” Amazon.com  

   

      I will start by saying to anyone reading this that I know it is a convention in Young Adult Fiction to use slang and other ways of shortening sentences to make them sound more relatable.  I also I understand that sometimes an author tries to create a sense of connection with the audience by using this type of language.  But there are so many instances of such terrible murdering of the English language in this book I could hardly stand it. “One of those ones,” “Katana sword,” “it was truly a battle of fang and sword.”  Really?  Sorry, not buying.  Along with that, so many cliches are used SO often.  If she said caress one more time when she just meant touch, I was going to scream.  I could quote more than a half a dozen examples from the beginning of the book alone.  

      The story is a typical post-apocalyptic story where vampires have taken over the world and killed everyone.  Except seemingly the hero and her mother and brother.  The problem with this is that she begins by saying it’s a viral outbreak and then says that crosses and holy water work on the vampires.  That’s illogical, either it’s a viral outbreak or vampires are the result of demons and magic.  Can’t have it both ways, it doesn’t make any sense. Why would a virus care about cross or holy water? 

       At one point in the story the main character is worried that the vampires are going to get into her bunker where she and her mother and brother have been living for the totality of the outbreak.  So, in the whole time the outbreak had occurred which was seemingly over quite a few months, this had never occurred to her.  Except she keeps saying how protected they are in said bunker, so then what are you worried about?  This seemed like a lame way to try and create tension where there wasn’t any.  

       The main character in the story does a lot of things that don’t make sense just from a commonsense point of view and the world is painted very illogically.  So, I guess they have that in common.  This is a very common set of tropes connected with a very common back drop. There are so many better books out there with the same subject executed so much better.