The Most Disappointing Book I've Ever Read

That is how I would describe Children of the Night, the third of my four vampire novels for the summer. Maybe I set myself for this one, given the hyperbolic title of my previous post about Mr. Simmons. Still, his other books are very much deserving of that praise. Children was not.

In fact, "not" is a good theme to use to describe the book. As in, not scary, not suspenseful, not interesting, not having good characters, and not worth buying. There's no way I would have even finished the book, except for The Summer of the Vampire. The book is slow: it was about 150 pages in before anything even remotely scary occurred, and that lasted for about five pages. The characters are so bad they're almost painful. Example: one of the main characters, a young Romanian medical student, talked intermittently like a California surfer-dude. And it worked about as well as the idea sounds. The book was so bad that I was 20 pages away from learning the closing revelations it was promising and left it to sit for a day and a half from sheer apathy.

Needless to say, I don't think you should run out and buy Children of the Night.