Blood Feud by Steven Roman – A Book Review




The Saga of Pandora Zwieback

Everything you know is wrong. Thus is the life of Pandora, a delusional goth teen with severe antisocial tendencies and a history of  paranoid visions. She is exiled to upstate New York with her mother and estranged from her father,  the curator of Renfield’s House of Horrors, a NYC Paranormal Museum. Pan searches for not who she is but what she is. An errant tasering begins unlocking the keys to what she is and the role she plays in a world that lives just under the collective subconscious.

OK, so having just reread the above paragraph I know it sounds a bit disjointed and incoherent. So is Pan. That’s why she has Sabastienne, the 400-year-old protectress of the universe. This unlikely paring makes for one of the most wondrous duos ever to grace the pages of a Paranormal Buddy Story. Equal parts Sorcerer’s Apprentice and 48 Hours, this is a mystic rollercoaster ride that glimpses a demonic past and uncertain future in the hands of two unlikely women who the fates have pared.

Steven Roman has an interesting style in this series; constantly cutting back and forth in time to the back-stories of the myriad characters. It’s a style that works well within the fast pace structure. As this is the first in a series, this book does a good job of establishing tone, setting, characters and intensity. I found myself nearing the end of the 300+ pages wondering where and how in the hell he was going to end this and was more than a little surprised, perhaps shocked would better describe it.

This is Dome, sayin’: Its charmingly fun, addictively energetic, explosively violent and almost terminally endearing. Oh, and highly recommended.

For the purposes of full disclosure, this book was a review copy sent to SFSN. No other remuneration was given or implied

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