The bird of Hermes is my name, eating my wings to make me tame. Let’s release the control art restriction system for Shutter, by Courtney Alameda.
Synopsis:
Micheline Helsing is a tetrachromat—a girl who sees the auras of the undead in a prismatic spectrum. As one of the last descendants of the Van Helsing lineage, she has trained since childhood to destroy monsters both corporeal and spiritual: the corporeal undead go down by the bullet, the spiritual undead by the lens. With an analog SLR camera as her best weapon, Micheline exorcises ghosts by capturing their spiritual energy on film. She’s aided by her crew: Oliver, a techno-whiz and the boy who developed her camera’s technology; Jude, who can predict death; and Ryder, the boy Micheline has known and loved forever.
When a routine ghost hunt goes awry, Micheline and the boys are infected with a curse known as a soulchain.
As the ghostly chains spread through their bodies, Micheline learns that if she doesn’t exorcise her entity in seven days or less, she and her friends will die. Now pursued as a renegade agent by her monster-hunting father, Leonard Helsing, she must track and destroy an entity more powerful than anything she’s faced before . . . or die trying.
Lock, stock, and lens, she’s in for one hell of a week.
Source: Goodreads
SPOILERS BELOW
The Hunt for Halloween Horror continues with the latest young adult horror book recommended to me by Goodreads. The story this time is set in an urban fantasy world plagued by undead: zombies, vampires, and ghosts. Our protagonists are members of the Hellsing Organization, which exists to hunt the dead.
…No, wait. That should be “Helsing”, with only one L. Dammit, that’s going to take a while to get used to.
Anyways, our protagonist this time is Micheline Helsing, a young but capable reaper who specializes in using a camera to capture ghosts. However, after an exorcism gone wrong, she and her friends are cursed by a vengeful spirit. They have seven days to track down and defeat the ghost, or they’ll end up joining it on the other side.
Of the books I’ve read so far for the Hunt for Halloween Horror, this one is definitely the best. It presents a detailed and interesting world, and has gripping and suspenseful action scenes. I cannot, unfortunately, say that it was outstanding: my biggest problem with it being the tedious, by-the-numbers love subplot with Ryder. Micheline’s in love with him, but can’t be with him because she’s supposed to have an arranged marriage to somebody from a high-class family; and I don’t need to say anything more, because it’s so cliche and formulaic that you can guess all the rest from those details alone.
Oh, and speaking of guessing, I should not have been able to call as early as I did that the main villain would be the ghost of Dracula. The book tried to claim early on that vampires don’t have souls and thus can’t leave ghosts; but I wasn’t fooled for a moment. And then he showed up using the alias “Luca” – come on, Vlad, buddy, that’s no better than Alucard. Truly, Discworld was right: the true fatal weakness of vampires is not sunlight or stakes, but their belief that everyone will be fooled if only they spell their names backwards.
Anyways, those issues I said, I did like this book and would be interested in reading a sequel, if one came out – Goodreads lists it as number one of a series, but it’s been three years and there’s no sign of a follow-up yet. Well, one can hope. In the meantime, I’ll be continuing looking through Goodreads’s horror recommendations, with this being the new high-water mark.
Final Rating: 3/5
profmorbius 