House Of Night.

It's had a few mentions on here so far, so what the hell, I'll talk about House Of Night for an entire entry.

I have such a divided opinion on this series, that I'm still not entirely sure I like it or not.

First of all, it's meant to be another Vampire (or, as they put it, Vampyre) series. But the school has various rituals, for new moons, the harvest season etc etc, and they present a table laden with food, and a mixture of blood, win and spices, as a token to their Goddess. They stand at the four compass points and evoke the four elements. That is paganism, or witchcraft (depending on your source of information). They occasionally drink blood, but it's a sexual thing. They're dominated by women, and treat men how 'witches' do in folklore.

So, as long as you accept they're calling it 'Vampyre' and not 'Witchcraft', the basic storyline is pretty good. A 'hunter' will show up around the time a vampyre will start this transition, and mark them with a cresent-shape tattoo, normally a blue one, in the middle of their forehead. They get enrolled in one of many schools across country, and attend classes at night and sleep in the day. They're taught about their power and history and are taught a lot of creative things, because they apparently excel in creative fields (P.C and Kristen Cast spend a lot of time naming singers and actors who are fully fledged Vampyres). Some of the adult vampyres have special powers, Neferet, the school's head, has healing powers. Zoey Redbird, the protagonist, can evoke all four elements, and spirit (and is the only fledging who has more than just the cresent tattoo. She gets an extra one each book). Neferet turns out to be fairly evil, and she and Zoey basically end up in an all-out war as the series goes on.

I'm simplifying it a lot. But just explaining the details gets confusing. It's their style of writing. They've got vampyre's who died instead of making the change who came back to life with red tattoos, and they spend all their time trying not to eat everyone in sight, and actually burn in sunlight; Zoey's human boyfriend who doesn't seem to have a spine, yet I still find likeable (rare, for me, but he does have common sense, and that's a plus, right?); a fallen angel who used to serve their Goddess who's trying to rape and kill all women, and his half-human, half-raven babies. Oh, and these warrior dudes, and a vampyre who lost her powers and became human again when one of the red vampyre's drank her blood. Yeah, they've tried to make that into a cohesive story.

My main bugbear, as I say to my friend Sally, who also reads the stories, is their reptition. Not like I've complained about before, but ... okay, Zoey's main friends are Shaunee, Erin, Damien, Jack, Aphrodite and Stevie-Rae. Her boyfriends are Eric and Heath. Say Zoey and Damien were having a conversation. It takes a page or two of writing. Erin and Shaunee walk in. The conversation is repeated almost word-f0r-word, with Erin and Shaunee weighing in their two cents. Three or four more pages. Aphrodite walks in ... yeah, you can guess. Sometimes, it takes two chapters to have one conversation, on repeat. If I wanted to read it again, I'd flip back and reread for myself. Those books would be so short if not for the repeated conversations.

Also, Zoey ... I don't know, she's been singled out early on and is pretty full of her own specialness. So when she decides something is how it is, that's it. And some of her ideas are pretty stupid, but everyone goes along with them.

But still ... I don't know ... there's still something about it. It was getting so interesting in the last few chapters of Hunted, the 6th book, and then they did something really weird and completely blindsighted me. Maybe that's it, they're so unpredictable in their storyline that it's weirdly addictive. I mean, birdmen? Snow in Alabama? They're crazy! So I'll definitely be buying the next book out, and complaining about it as I read. It's what I do. One thing I can be sure of - I don't know how the hell they're going to rescue the students from the ending of book 6 ...