Books4Tomorrow: REVIEW: "REIGN OF BLOOD"

“REIGN OF BLOOD”

by Alexia Purdy

REVIEWED BY: Books4Tomorrow

OVERVIEW

"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.

REVIEW

I’ll be the first to admit that one theme I’m growing continuously tired of reading is vampires. Yes, you heard me right. Vampires. I’ve read countless books this year built around the vampire theme and it’s becoming monotonous, predictable, and draining (no pun intended). So along comes Alexia Purdy with “Reign of Blood”, and she completely blows me away with this action-packed, post-apocalyptic novel centered on the vampire theme, but so uniquely different it left me giddy with delight.

I’m absolutely passionate about strong, take-no-nonsense, female protagonists, and it thrills me to no end when they kick butt like it’s going out of style. Once I determined that the heroine wasn’t going to mope and balk at every obstacle she had to face, I relaxed and lost myself in a story where fear and uncertainty is the order of the day for the last three humans alive. April is everything I expect a formidable vampire slayer to be. Her strong points are hand-to-hand combat, a good aim when throwing hand-grenades, using machetes to slice off vampire heads with the same ease we use knives to butter toast, the ability to make Lara Croft eat dust (okay, I just threw that in there), and doesn’t think twice to go after every feral vampire in dead and decaying Las Vegas to find and rescue her mom and little brother.

Of course, if a book begins with the sentence, “Never tease anything that wants to eat you”; it has my immediate, undivided attention. To add to that, I also have a newfound fascination with post-apocalyptic novels, and however much I no longer enjoy reading about all sorts of same-old, same-old vampires, the ones in this story were thoroughly terrifying. One paragraph that had me giggling was the mention of Gotye’s song “Somebody that I use to know”. It was a nice touch and very appropriate in the tongue-in-cheek context it was used.

Kudos to Alexia Purdy for drawing me into a story where the fiery action never ends, the romance isn’t sappy or causes you to roll your eyes in exasperation, and a plot that builds up to an explosive finale with a nice big surprising twist. She deftly sketches a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas in a way that is easy to visualize and makes you feel as though you’re smack dab centre in the fighting scenes, in the midst of the death and decay of this once bustling city.

I hope there will be more books to follow on this one, and I’ll definitely be reading more by this author whose writing had me glued to the pages from start to finish. “Reign of Blood” will satisfy many a bookworm’s appetite – splendid writing, a marvelous storyline, and a read I highly recommend!