The Chronicles of Viktor Valentine by Z BrewerMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
When I was in high school, senior year, I got to volunteer behind the librarian's desk, and the librarian recommended me a lot of good books to try out - including The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod, which had flown under my radar until that time. Now, fourteen years after ending the original series and ten years after ending the first spinoff Slayer Chronicles, Z Brewer is back with their latest legacy sequel, a stealth job of it that focuses on original characters of whom Vlad himself would approve, plus some vampires both (to quote Young Frankenstein) "famous...and infamous!"
We're no longer in Bathory or Stokerton, but in the very similar town of Nowhere - I believe Brewer once said Bathory and Stokerton were in Michigan, so my guess is that Nowhere is in Wisconsin since there's tons of farmland around the town to supply the Tasty Cow. (And, as Alys's backstory indicates, there's a lot of travel to get there from California.) Halloween, meanwhile, is fast approaching - unlike the Vlad Tod books, this one only takes place over the course of a few weeks, not an entire school year. But there's still room for tons of Easter eggs involving Elysia, the Slayer Society, and the return of some of our favorite goths from the old days, namely October and Sprat.
Brewer's back just as excellently as Tim Burton was this year with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Vlad Tod would approve, and my inner teenager does too, because Viktor Valentine is the kind of protagonist whom Z writes best - the kid just trying to live his best life between the boring mundanity of humanity and the macabre pull of Elysia, with the help of video games, horror movies, and the occasional scary book or two. And, of course, dinner to go from the Tasty Cow.
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