Here’s Melanie Tem’s first 2 novels.
Prodigal
I was expecting more from this book than what I got.
Lucy’s brother has disappeared, but something that may be his ghost keeps showing up at her house and attacking Lucy and her mom. Her brother was troubled, and he’d been assigned a social worker before disappearing. A few months later, Lucy’s older sister starts acting up and seeing the same social worker. She goes missing too, but Lucy occasionally finds new messages from her in her diary.
Read no further if you want to avoid spoilers.
Now it’s Lucy’s turn to start misbehaving. She gets assigned the same social worker. It turns out he’s a fat vampire paedophile/balloon who literally feeds on children’s misery. He doesn’t kill the kids completely though. Even after Lucy’s brother’s corpse is buried, part of him is still alive enough to crawl into his mother’s pussy. Is this not making sense to you? It didn’t make any to me either.
By the time I got to the end of this book i was very confused.
Blood Moon
A woman adopts a kid who believes he can move stuff with his mind. Then she gets pregnant. Her dad is a jerk.
This book was a boring pile of shit. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Nothing interesting or scary happens. None of the characters were likeable, and the supernatural element that’s hinted at might just be figment of the characters’ imagination. Pure crap.
Prodigal was Tem’s first novel, and it was released under the “cool” Dell Abyss line. Her third novel, Wilding, was also put out by Dell. Blood Moon came between these 2 books, and it was released by The Women’s Press, a feminist publishing company from England. I’m all for feminist horror, but this is barely a horror novel, and I don’t know if it’s really a feminist novel either. The male characters are all chodes. Is that enough?
Honestly, I wanted to like these books, but I was very disappointed. Prodigal had some weird bits, but Blood Moon was downright unenjoyable. Tem’s writing isn’t horrible, but these novels just didn’t do it for me. This might have something to do with the fact that both books are about abused, at-risk children, one of the topics I least want to read about during my free time. Maybe I’ll give this author’s short fiction a go in the future.
Nocturnal Revelries 