Lord Loss

Darren Shan is fun. He is just so much fun and while possibly by 2019 could be some super sensitive PC crap like many other authors (I don't know), at the point when he wrote this he was just unashamed awesome.

Grubbs Grady is a normal kid who likes making trouble, pranking his older sister. You know. Up until something is just starting to be weird with his family. Everyone is tense and he realises they made up a story to remove him from home for a night for whatever reason. When he goes to find out what's wrong he finds all of them dead, brutally chopped up by demons in their home. He goes insane from the trauma and is relatively “content” in his madness until his uncle Dervish shows up, telling him he believes demons really exist. So Grubbs goes to live with him and find out everything.

The thing about Darren Shan that I appreciate is that the child characters are not sanitised little genius saints who are basically mouthpieces for the author's agenda. They are not mouthpieces to tell kids what the author believes is wrong with the real world now, like so many YA books are right now. These are children who can be rude and are boisterous, they can be annoying and selfish, but they are all relatable. Not out there to flatter the kids and tell them what to think.
The adults are the same. They are not there just to be stupid to make it seem like teenagers are the only competent people who can see the issue and solve it too. Not there to hold the kids back and act all sorts of abusive because adults are bad.

Now you have to know that this series is fucked up. There is so much blood, so much suffering and death. It's not for easily freaked out people. Which is one of the reasons why I like it; it fills a niche that was definitely needed to be filled when it was written. I would say even today it's an interesting example of things. Now YA specifically is becoming incredibly political and melodramatic, with book after book of increasingly more ridiculous speculative shit about the laws the politicians that we NEED to hate today will totally absolutely pass (no, they won't). Among those this universal horror is really refreshing in a way. It's really outside the realm of those things, the Current Year drama about this or that. It's something that will definitely freak you out without any of that.

I have read these books way back, maybe 8 years ago. I'm going to say it, Dervish is still my favourite so far, freaking awesome with his slightly quirky ways. It's great to see a father figure who is not portrayed as either evil and sadistic or a total whiny useless Care Bear.

Have a nice day and it's your loss if you've not read this yet!