3 out of 4 stars
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Nightlord: Sunset Review
Nightlord: Sunset by Garon Whited is the first book in this new series. In this book we are introduced to a character by the name of Eric. He has been leading an average life as a professor at a university enjoying the time teaching his students. After a fun night out with the guys having more than a few drinks he wakes up in a house with a woman that he does not know at all but he doesn’t feel any fear when he sees her. Instead he ends up spending a lot of time with her enjoying himself and going through a change that at first he barely notices but as time progresses it becomes more and more apparent until she finally tells him the truth. Eric looks a lot like her deceased lord from many years ago and so she took him and turned him and now he is a vampire but one who can walk during the day and night but he must avoid two times of day: sunset and sunrise. If he does not avoid these two times of daylight he will die a most painful death. But there is of course…more, there is a group of people who are actively hunting him and in order to stay alive he must do what he must to stay a step ahead of him. They take the woman he comes to love from him and so he decides to take the fight to them but will this mean for him in the end?
Now this is the first book that I have read by Garon Whited and being a huge fan of vampires and the paranormal I was sure that I would enjoy this book to no end. Overall this is a well written novel that has several engaging points to it that make it very unique from other vampire novel s that are out there now. Sasha, essentially his creator this time around, shows him one of two ways that he will be feeding now as a vampire at night: he can feed off of human’s energy – their life force, and he can feed off of blood. If he drinks down a human’s life force in one go then he kills them and gets a major boost from them that if he lived as a normal vampire, no magic usage, then he could live off of that for a year alone supplemented with blood of course. I found this to be very interesting and something new and different from the traditional vampires who just simply drink blood alone. Also, the fact that the people who come after Eric, basically out of nowhere, they come from another reality essentially because they are not from this reality that he is so accustomed to is something unique and different that adds something more to the story. So when Eric loses Sasha to this people he decides to take the fight to them one way or another.
What I don’t like about this book is that for almost the first quarter of it Eric spends so much time pontificating almost everything that is going on with him concerning the changes that he is undergoing in becoming a vampire. It drags the story down and makes it so tedious to read and more than a bit boring which is sad. All in all I think that if some of that had been taken out then the story would have flowed a lot better and would have stayed engaging the whole way through. As it is Eric wishes to analyze and understand every aspect of his change from why he needs to eat so much during the day when he is mostly human to the intricacies of siphoning off energy from the humans at night when he casts his net to gather it. I just feel that the story does not need all of this and that it takes this book from being really good to even great because of its uniqueness to just being a good read.
What I appreciate is how the story does pick up and he stops trying to overanalyze every little thing when he crosses over to this other plane to confront this group who are trying to hunt and exterminate him. I love how the story becomes more engaging with various paranormal and supernatural elements that are brought in and even the various creatures that live in this new world where he finds himself a stranger. I wish that the story had been more focused like this and I’m sure many would devour it in no time flat.
As is, while I did end up enjoying the story very much I will be rating this book 3 out of 4 stars. I believe that if some of the analytic pieces had been edited out that this story would have turned into a really good read and while it would have shortened the story considerably as well it would have been a good thing overall. Typically if a book does not fully engage me in the first few chapters I’m not going to be inclined to finish but this story redeems itself after the first quarter and truly becomes and engaging page turner that one can appreciate. All in all I look forward to reading the other books in this series very soon.
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Nightlord: Sunset
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