Suffer the Children

Honestly, I thought about dropping this one a few times, but I kept going. At one point, I thought to myself, ‘Well, I'm 200 pages in, so it's pointless to stop, since I'm more than halfway.' I think there are spoilers in this review.

And so I kept going. Was it worth it? Not at all, but at least, now I know. Small consolation.

I'm not convinced this chap can write. The prose was appalling and trite. The only interesting bits are when the author is dropping a modicum of biology on you, and it's probably more interesting reading that from a medical textbook. The characters he chooses to follow are all humdrum and also trite. The doctor, the crazy mother, the angry blue collar dad and his religious-ish wife. Not one single character in the bunch was engaging. I actually rather disliked some of the characters.

Essentially, this is a vampire, post-apocalyptic medical thriller. One day, all the kids in the world die. Then one day, they wake up. But they need blood to survive. Everyone on the planet is basically host to a parasite dubbed Herod, but only prepubescent children are affected. And so, parents start going postal and giving their kids their blood. Some parents kill themselves, perhaps accidentally. Some parents start killing others. And our heroes are the Coopers (blue collar man and wife), the Harrises (the doctor and nurse wife, who is nuts), and Ramona (crazy mom). The Coopers have two young children affected, and Ramona has a son. In the end, of course, the kids go vamp, fully controlled by the parasite, and the world is in ruins.

There was precious little creep in this for me. Maybe if a better writer had tackled this topic, it could have been interesting. But the execution of this book was badly done. The characters are all so dull and often inane that I couldn't care less what happened to any of them. Every one of them was so gendered that I couldn't handle it. Nothing progressive here, even when it tries to be. I realize that's the way most of the characters are supposed to be, but I think it went farther than that.

I really didn't like this one at all. I have nothing really good to say about it. I wasn't scared, the prose sucked, the characters sucked, and it was just bad. Not even hilarious bad, or bad enough to cause fury. It was just mediocre bad.