A review by sade
Blood Crazy by Simon Clark

2.0

1.5 Stars
Clark, admirably has to be said, does try to take this book in a some sort of horror direction - it definitely was a fascinating concept, but ultimately is bogged down by way too much YA tropes...insta love, poetic language

This book is YA to the CORE!! meaning you spend a shit load of time reading through a teenager's thoughts that come of in a somewhat poetic form. For some weird reason hard core YA writers have this insane need to qualify every action with poetic like words, like as if for some reason the reader will be unable to understand the depth of emotion if this isn't used.

"Memories of the drive come back to me now. Bright and hard but somehow broken and disconnected".

"Baz stared at the blood. Fresh and red and wet".

I know some people don't mind this, but ultimately it's not a form of writing that i've been able to grow to love.

Is it hard core YA if characters don't fall in love??? Imagine a hard core YA novel, with 2 teenage characters and no love story in the works. The HORROR!!! How dare you put 2 teenagers of the opposite sex together and not make them see the stars in each other's eyes.. HOW DARE YOU!!!! This is YA goddammit!!!
I imagine every hard core YA writer has this thought and well voila insta love is born...

and the final nail in the coffin of this book, explaining the horror.
I'm more amused than upset (ok fine, fine, i am a little bit upset) with the direction this book went when it came to this part of this book. It was unbelievably laughable. The book basically uses

Spoiler

Freud's theory of consciousness to explain away the horrors. When you think of it, it's actually quite clever, my problem as someone who has spent almost all her higher educational years using social theories to write essays is that we all know using one theory to explain the universe in social sciences is beyond simplistic and so wrong. You know that just because one theory is well liked doesn't mean social theorists still can't poke so much holes in it, it'll leave your head spinning. Also i'm pretty sure Freud theory of consciousness doesn't mean you'll start acting like a zombie

Like C'mon, if you're going to go down the intellectual route at least have the decency to do it right. This is the problem the bulk of horror books with the M.O of some unexplained phenomena have: EXPLAINING THE CAUSE OF THE HORROR. That's basically where good horror books go to die (not like this was a good book anyways but you know generally speaking). It's one of the issues i had with [a:Dean Koontz|9355|Dean Koontz|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1487353807p2/9355.jpg]'s books and i still can't bring myself to read his books to this day..It's one of the issues i had with [b:Run|10595576|Run|Blake Crouch|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328317461s/10595576.jpg|15503177] by Blake Crouch.

Other random peeves were the names of the chapter which 9 out of 10 times had absolutely nothing to do with the content of the chapter. Also, what i can only describe as

Spoiler

gratuitous sex scenes

. why was it there? I find it confusing that Clark could go really vivid on those scenes but somehow skimp on the brutality that was sure to be occurring in this book.

I can't in all honesty say there was anything to love about this book. It was so unbelievably lukewarm..