W. Doug Bolden

Review

I picked up the first book in the Nightside series almost accidently. I stumbled across it one day while shopping at a local bookstore. It pretty much fills out the rest of my review to say that, having read it, I have the other five on order and cannot wait to read them. This review would be deplorably short for a fan of the victorian novel, and so I will expand. A tad.

The packaging is perhaps a little too quick to paint the novel in a corner surrounded by the walls of 20th century vampire lore, on one hand, and 20th century modern magic tales, on the other. It plays it off as a detective story somewhere between the worlds of Anita Blake or Harry Potter. In actuality, Nightside is sort of like a humorous and surreal, if violent and scary, saturday morning cartoon for adults. It is a world where everything goes according to the whims of Simon R. Green, and you can take it or leave it.

Luckily it is a fun enough, and quick enough read, that you should have no real problem in taking it. It should consume no more than a few hours of your time, and a good deal will happen. Once it starts, it never really shows down. It reminds me largely of the Vampire Hunter D series where a main character has a knack for just scraping by, in style, while the world throws out one-shot horror after one-short horror.

I will not say it is great book, but well enough. The best part about it is the fact that it is aware of what it is, a book meant to be read by horror fans who like a little light mystery, some gore, and lots of fun jabs at the hand of a hero that is not so much insurmountable as extremely determined to make it to the end of a book.