Scan barcode
A review by charspages
Marked by P.C. Cast, Kristin Cast
1.0
I recently read an article about how reading bad or below-average books can actually help improve your writing. So, for improvement's sake, I decided to reread this lovely twelve-book series I devoured (and loved!) when I was 12 years old and on the brink of further implementing my book obsession (which has been pretty wild since the very beginning, to be honest.)
I mean, wow. I'm not even certain enough of my brain cells survived reading this to actually write something after, good or bad or anything in between. I'm pretty sure they invented How Not To Write guides after this was published - and for good reason.
I just want to know the Casts' secret. Did they bribe their publisher? Read out loud from this book until he was begging them to stop? How in the world did they convince someone to publish this?
But let's start at the very beginning: Why this Book is Terrible and You Should Not Read It.
DISCLAIMER: This is about to get very, very rant-y. I passionately hate-read this book and prepared to tear it to shreds in this review. I cannot stress enough that I do not mean to insult either P.C. or Kristin Cast personally. Remember, when I was 12, I loved this series and genuinely waited for each new release.
PLOT: 0 / 5
Are the Casts in a competition with [a:Anna Todd|3927354|Anna Todd|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1550778141p2/3927354.jpg] to see who can crank out the most illogical, cliché-filled plot? Cause it seriously looks like they're winning.
I honestly didn't think there was any other book out there that had a worse storyline than [b:After|22557520|After (After, #1)|Anna Todd|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1438077259s/22557520.jpg|26102134]. Boy, was I wrong.
In the first novel of the series, the protagonist, Zoey Redbird, turns into a vampyre (yes, they're cool and unique here, so you have to spell them with a y, even though it cracks me up every single time because the German pronunciation makes it sound like vampür in my head) by being Marked by a Tracker at school one day. What happens when you get Marked is basically: some dude shows up, points at you, recites the worst monologue I've ever laid my eyes upon, and finally, you faint and wake up with a brand new half-moon tattoo on your forehead. Because apparently, vampyres aren't just super strong and super fast here, they're also super good at tattooing people without any equipment or physical contact whatsoever. It's truly magical.
Lo and behold, our dear freshly tattooed Zoey makes for the vampyre boarding school, the House of Night, where she is supposed to go to class for four years and participate in random subjects before completing the Change into an adult vampyre or dying a painful, slow death. By now I'm totally hoping it's the latter, but I'm out of luck. Why changing into a vampyre would take four entire years in the first place is beyond me.
Instead of coughing up a lung or two, Zoey ends up running around like she owns the place, makes four new friends in one day, gets a hot boyfriend, and challenges the House of Night's resident Queen Bee for her position. Bitch, I don't even have four friends. What the hell?
I mean, the plot literally takes place over the span of four days, and by the end of it, Zoey is not only the most popular girl in town, but the only fledgling in all of history with a filled-in mark. And she scores the hot, popular Senior dude after talking to him approximately once. Unless jamming your tongue down somebody else's throat is a weird new vampyre greeting, I'm calling bullshit.
Don't even get me started on that part where Zoey becomes leader of the Dark Daughters, an elite school organization, even though she's, you know, only been there for one week. She knows next to knothing about the vampyre world, has no experience whatsoever, and her greatest deed so far was calling Aphrodite a "ho-bag" 611 times in a row, but sure, let's make her the leader of an important and respected student organization that upholds rituals deeply rooted in vampyre tradition and represents the school. Instead of someone who - just a wild thought here - actually knows what they're doing and didn't move in yesterday.
My head hurts.
CHARACTERS: 1 / 5
I'm giving this one star only because I'm so unashamedly amused at how bad these characters are. As a comedic ensamble, they'd be priceless.
ZOEY REDBIRD is the protagonist of the series and doesn't only have a name that already screams Mary Sue! in fifteen foot high neon letters, she also has the personality of a cockroach, except cockroaches have an actual biological purpose and don't make me roll my eyes so hard I give myself a nosebleed every five minutes.
Like your average Young Adult-Mary Sue, Zoey is sixteen, in high school, and way too cool for you - except she keeps complaining about having no friends and being so unique and different. Gee, Zo, I don't know, maybe if you developed an actual personality people would want to befriend you?
All she consists of before she's Marked is the following rather short, but colorful list: hating on her stepdad (whom she so very eloquently calls "step-loser"); complaining about teenagers who party, drink, and have sex; and feeling superior to her (alleged) best friend, Kayla, and her ex-almost-boyfriend, Heath. Calling either of them stupid is a brave call from someone who uses the word "gihugic" unironically. (No, I did not make that up. Even my creativity has its limits.)
Besides being annoying and dumber than a sack of sand, Zoey is also a plain old hypocrite: she loves complaining about Aphrodite and her friends, claiming that they run around acting like they're so much better than everyone else, but then doesn't take two seconds to turn around and talk about "some loser kid's blood" which she would very much like to consume because she's, you know, a vampyre and Elliott from Lit class is just a refrigerator because he has bad hair. If hypocrisy was an Olympic sport, Z-bird would take home all the medals.
Other than that, Zoey constantly talks about fashion - Maui Jim this, Prada that. They don't even talk fashion this much on Project Runway, and that's a show about making fashion. Or she likes to remind everyone of how different she is because she doesn't have oral sex. She's truly earned a gold star, that one.
I'm also pretty much convinced that Zoey invented the "overpowered MC" trope that has been ripe in Young Adult fiction these past few years, because get this: she's not only the first fledgling ever to have a completely filled-in Mark, no, she can also control all five elements, which has been unheard of in vampyre history, and ends up High Priestess in training with a full vampyre tattoo at the end of book one. While your average adult vampyre will have a half-moon tattoo on their forehead and then, after completing the Change, some ornamental tattoos on their cheekbones, Zoey is a fledgling with tattoos all over her body within four weeks.
Of course, lovely Zoey isn't enough to bear just yet, so the Casts have come up with an entire quirky! and fun! group of friends for her.
There's STEVIE RAE, who has the personality of a cowboy boot and is only there to talk with a Southern accent or giggle. (Stevie Rae used to be my absolute favorite character when I first read these books. What a blind fool I've been.)
There's the twins, SHAUNEE and ERIN, who aren't really twins but are called that because they seem to be taking turns using their last functioning brain cell to complete each other's sentences. Truly amazing.
There's DAMIEN, the token gay guy who doesn't fit in with the other gay guys at school because they're too girly, so he hangs out with a group of straight girls instead. I suspect he maybe does it to feel smart, because the female parts of their little gang seem to have a combined IQ of 45 on a good day. I would have rather read about Henrietta's Fighting Hens than spend one more chapter reading the cringy and embarrassing "banter" between Ms. Overpowered and her Group of Equally Annoying and Useless Friends.
And there's APHRODITE, who - guess what - named herself after the Greek goddess of love and passion and is - you guessed it - a total bitch. I mean, Zoey pretty much acts like Aphrodite crawled out of hell to torment her personally with how gorgeous and sexy she is. Yay for reinforcing the demonization of female confidence in this absolute blast of a novel.
Of course there's also some fun side characters, such as NEFERET who admittedly has a cool name but is, other than that, the worst mentor ever (seriously, Dumbledore is Teacher of the Year compared to her) and functions as a flat, two-dimensional villain later on in the story. I'm tragically bored by now.
Last but not least, we have the pleasure of meeting ERIK NIGHT who has possibly one of the worst names I've ever heard and is about as charming as a piece of gum stuck to your shoe: he's clingy, annoying, and sugary sweet.
WORLD BUILDING: 1 / 5
I mean, the Casts used a clever tactic here: they placed the House of Night in their home state, Oklahoma, so they wouldn't have to come up with any new places except for the boarding school itself. They even went so far to claim famous celebrities such as Shania Twain or Shakespeare himself are/were vampyres.
Please. Shakespeare's currently laughing his gay ass off; he wouldn't be caught dead with a bunch of losers who think they have the moral high ground because they've never sucked a dick.
The House of Night itself is quite vacuous itself: I recall a vague description of a bunch of stone buildings and a temple, dedicated to the vampyre goddess Nyx. That's pretty much it.
DIVERSITY: 0 / 5
The Casts really try to be diverse: they have a main character who has Cherokee blood, a gay guy, and a Jamaican girl. However, those three turned out to be some of the most horrible, offensive, stereotype-ridden representation I've ever seen (which has to mean something, because it's not like there's an abundance of awesome rep out there.)
Damien is soft-spoken and feminine, interested in fashion and cross-stitching - which, in itself, is fine. What's not fine is the blatant homophobia seeping through these pages:
"And this is the token guy in our group, Damien Maslin. But he's gay, so I don't really think he counts as a guy."
Wooooooow. Thanks, Stevie Rae, for reinforcing the notion that gay men aren't real men. What the literal fuck?
Or, three pages later, the actual use of the f-word:
"'Think National Merit Scholar in charge of the Honor Society mixed with cheerleaders and band fags.'
'Hey, isn't it disrespectful to your gayness to call them band fags?' Stevie Rae asked.
'I'm using the word as a term of endearment,' Damien said."
Using a term that originated from gay people being rolled up in carpets and lit on fire, therefore resembling cigarettes - which are widely known as fags in the UK - as a term of endearment? I think my spirit just fucking launched itself into the sun or something. This is some Grade-A-Straightie nonsense.
Shaunee, the Resident Black Girl, is only described in terms of food: latte macchiato, mocha, you name it. Anything edible that remotely resembles the color brown immediately becomes a substitute for her name. The bar is literally on the floor and the Casts dug a hole to avoid it.
The stereotyping continues in a rampage of slut-shaming: Zoey's really thinking about Aphrodite's sex life a lot. I mean, the words "bitch" and "hag" make up 81 % of her vocabulary, and there's this lovely paragraph to further prove how saintly Zoey is:
"Yes, I was aware of the whole oral sex thing. I doubt if there's a teenager alive in America who isn't aware that most of the adult public think we're giving guys blow jobs like they used to give guys gum (or maybe more appropriately suckers). Okay, that's just bullshit, and it's always made me mad. Of course there are girls who thinks it's 'cool' to give guys head. Uh, they're wrong. Those of us with functioning brains know that it is not cool to be used like that."
Right. Because giving a blow job makes you morally bankrupt and sucks out your brain cells.
WRITING STYLE: 0 / 5
I, a writer with at least seven years of experience, can think of approximately zero words to describe the style which P.C. and Kristin Cast employ in their opening novel of the House of Night-series. All I can say is that there are so many parentheses. (Seriously, so many.)
Instead of trying to describe it, though, I decided to compile a list of quotes from the book for both your and my amusement. (FYI, the little blowjob-excerpt was not from a conversation Zoey was having. It was an actual descriptive passage in the text.)
Behold the beauty of words, employed by the Casts in the House of Night-series in a manner formerly (and thankfully) unbeknownst to mankind:
"I guess it was time I took things into my own hands (after all, they were well manicured)." Okay, Zoeybird, do I look like I give a flying fuck about your fingernails?
"Then I felt it. A tingling sensation that crawled over my skin and made my new Mark burn. Power. I felt power."
This chick is really trying to be some cheap version of Harry Potter with her tingling sensation nonsense. Somewhere, J. K. Rowling is pissing her pants laughing.
"'Isn't that weird? I'm a Redbird and a daughter of the sun, but I'm turning into a monster of the night.' I heard myself talking out loud and was surprised that my voice sounded so weak, especially when my words seemed to echo around me, as if I were talking into a vibrating drum."
She hears herself. Talking. To herself. I'm going to have a stroke.
"Suprise made me open my eyes. I was staring up at a light, which miraculously didn't hurt my eyes. Instead of the glaring light of the sun, this was more like a soft rain of candlelight filtering down from above. I sat up, and realized I was wrong. The light wasn't coming down. I was moving up toward it! I'm going to heaven. Well, that'll shock some people. I glanced down to seemy body!"
I just lose it at that overly enthusiastic and super shocking my body! at the end there every. Single. Time.
Or, my all-time favorite, unparalleled in its astonishing phrasing:
"I enjoyed the way the world looked, sparkling and new, but it was my body that kept drawing my attention. I floated closer to it. I was breathing in short, shallow pants. Well, my body was breathing like that, not the I that was me. (Talk about confusing pronoun usage.) And I/she didn't look good. I/she was all pale and her lips were blue. Hey! White face, blue lips, and red blood! Am I patriotic or what?"
I'm delighted. Thanks for the confidence boost, guys, because if a book that uses the terms "gihugic" and "birthday-cake-frosting-blue" can make it, I probably can, too.
OVERALL RATING: 0 / 5
Man, I really tried to find something good about this book, but if such a thing exists, it's hidden awfully well. I don't know which illiterate demon possessed twelve-year-old me and told me these books were good, but I'm glad he's gone now.
I mean, wow. I'm not even certain enough of my brain cells survived reading this to actually write something after, good or bad or anything in between. I'm pretty sure they invented How Not To Write guides after this was published - and for good reason.
I just want to know the Casts' secret. Did they bribe their publisher? Read out loud from this book until he was begging them to stop? How in the world did they convince someone to publish this?
But let's start at the very beginning: Why this Book is Terrible and You Should Not Read It.
DISCLAIMER: This is about to get very, very rant-y. I passionately hate-read this book and prepared to tear it to shreds in this review. I cannot stress enough that I do not mean to insult either P.C. or Kristin Cast personally. Remember, when I was 12, I loved this series and genuinely waited for each new release.
PLOT: 0 / 5
Are the Casts in a competition with [a:Anna Todd|3927354|Anna Todd|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1550778141p2/3927354.jpg] to see who can crank out the most illogical, cliché-filled plot? Cause it seriously looks like they're winning.
I honestly didn't think there was any other book out there that had a worse storyline than [b:After|22557520|After (After, #1)|Anna Todd|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1438077259s/22557520.jpg|26102134]. Boy, was I wrong.
In the first novel of the series, the protagonist, Zoey Redbird, turns into a vampyre (yes, they're cool and unique here, so you have to spell them with a y, even though it cracks me up every single time because the German pronunciation makes it sound like vampür in my head) by being Marked by a Tracker at school one day. What happens when you get Marked is basically: some dude shows up, points at you, recites the worst monologue I've ever laid my eyes upon, and finally, you faint and wake up with a brand new half-moon tattoo on your forehead. Because apparently, vampyres aren't just super strong and super fast here, they're also super good at tattooing people without any equipment or physical contact whatsoever. It's truly magical.
Lo and behold, our dear freshly tattooed Zoey makes for the vampyre boarding school, the House of Night, where she is supposed to go to class for four years and participate in random subjects before completing the Change into an adult vampyre or dying a painful, slow death. By now I'm totally hoping it's the latter, but I'm out of luck. Why changing into a vampyre would take four entire years in the first place is beyond me.
Instead of coughing up a lung or two, Zoey ends up running around like she owns the place, makes four new friends in one day, gets a hot boyfriend, and challenges the House of Night's resident Queen Bee for her position. Bitch, I don't even have four friends. What the hell?
I mean, the plot literally takes place over the span of four days, and by the end of it, Zoey is not only the most popular girl in town, but the only fledgling in all of history with a filled-in mark. And she scores the hot, popular Senior dude after talking to him approximately once. Unless jamming your tongue down somebody else's throat is a weird new vampyre greeting, I'm calling bullshit.
Don't even get me started on that part where Zoey becomes leader of the Dark Daughters, an elite school organization, even though she's, you know, only been there for one week. She knows next to knothing about the vampyre world, has no experience whatsoever, and her greatest deed so far was calling Aphrodite a "ho-bag" 611 times in a row, but sure, let's make her the leader of an important and respected student organization that upholds rituals deeply rooted in vampyre tradition and represents the school. Instead of someone who - just a wild thought here - actually knows what they're doing and didn't move in yesterday.
My head hurts.
CHARACTERS: 1 / 5
I'm giving this one star only because I'm so unashamedly amused at how bad these characters are. As a comedic ensamble, they'd be priceless.
ZOEY REDBIRD is the protagonist of the series and doesn't only have a name that already screams Mary Sue! in fifteen foot high neon letters, she also has the personality of a cockroach, except cockroaches have an actual biological purpose and don't make me roll my eyes so hard I give myself a nosebleed every five minutes.
Like your average Young Adult-Mary Sue, Zoey is sixteen, in high school, and way too cool for you - except she keeps complaining about having no friends and being so unique and different. Gee, Zo, I don't know, maybe if you developed an actual personality people would want to befriend you?
All she consists of before she's Marked is the following rather short, but colorful list: hating on her stepdad (whom she so very eloquently calls "step-loser"); complaining about teenagers who party, drink, and have sex; and feeling superior to her (alleged) best friend, Kayla, and her ex-almost-boyfriend, Heath. Calling either of them stupid is a brave call from someone who uses the word "gihugic" unironically. (No, I did not make that up. Even my creativity has its limits.)
Besides being annoying and dumber than a sack of sand, Zoey is also a plain old hypocrite: she loves complaining about Aphrodite and her friends, claiming that they run around acting like they're so much better than everyone else, but then doesn't take two seconds to turn around and talk about "some loser kid's blood" which she would very much like to consume because she's, you know, a vampyre and Elliott from Lit class is just a refrigerator because he has bad hair. If hypocrisy was an Olympic sport, Z-bird would take home all the medals.
Other than that, Zoey constantly talks about fashion - Maui Jim this, Prada that. They don't even talk fashion this much on Project Runway, and that's a show about making fashion. Or she likes to remind everyone of how different she is because she doesn't have oral sex. She's truly earned a gold star, that one.
I'm also pretty much convinced that Zoey invented the "overpowered MC" trope that has been ripe in Young Adult fiction these past few years, because get this: she's not only the first fledgling ever to have a completely filled-in Mark, no, she can also control all five elements, which has been unheard of in vampyre history, and ends up High Priestess in training with a full vampyre tattoo at the end of book one. While your average adult vampyre will have a half-moon tattoo on their forehead and then, after completing the Change, some ornamental tattoos on their cheekbones, Zoey is a fledgling with tattoos all over her body within four weeks.
Of course, lovely Zoey isn't enough to bear just yet, so the Casts have come up with an entire quirky! and fun! group of friends for her.
There's STEVIE RAE, who has the personality of a cowboy boot and is only there to talk with a Southern accent or giggle. (Stevie Rae used to be my absolute favorite character when I first read these books. What a blind fool I've been.)
There's the twins, SHAUNEE and ERIN, who aren't really twins but are called that because they seem to be taking turns using their last functioning brain cell to complete each other's sentences. Truly amazing.
There's DAMIEN, the token gay guy who doesn't fit in with the other gay guys at school because they're too girly, so he hangs out with a group of straight girls instead. I suspect he maybe does it to feel smart, because the female parts of their little gang seem to have a combined IQ of 45 on a good day. I would have rather read about Henrietta's Fighting Hens than spend one more chapter reading the cringy and embarrassing "banter" between Ms. Overpowered and her Group of Equally Annoying and Useless Friends.
And there's APHRODITE, who - guess what - named herself after the Greek goddess of love and passion and is - you guessed it - a total bitch. I mean, Zoey pretty much acts like Aphrodite crawled out of hell to torment her personally with how gorgeous and sexy she is. Yay for reinforcing the demonization of female confidence in this absolute blast of a novel.
Of course there's also some fun side characters, such as NEFERET who admittedly has a cool name but is, other than that, the worst mentor ever (seriously, Dumbledore is Teacher of the Year compared to her) and functions as a flat, two-dimensional villain later on in the story. I'm tragically bored by now.
Last but not least, we have the pleasure of meeting ERIK NIGHT who has possibly one of the worst names I've ever heard and is about as charming as a piece of gum stuck to your shoe: he's clingy, annoying, and sugary sweet.
WORLD BUILDING: 1 / 5
I mean, the Casts used a clever tactic here: they placed the House of Night in their home state, Oklahoma, so they wouldn't have to come up with any new places except for the boarding school itself. They even went so far to claim famous celebrities such as Shania Twain or Shakespeare himself are/were vampyres.
Please. Shakespeare's currently laughing his gay ass off; he wouldn't be caught dead with a bunch of losers who think they have the moral high ground because they've never sucked a dick.
The House of Night itself is quite vacuous itself: I recall a vague description of a bunch of stone buildings and a temple, dedicated to the vampyre goddess Nyx. That's pretty much it.
DIVERSITY: 0 / 5
The Casts really try to be diverse: they have a main character who has Cherokee blood, a gay guy, and a Jamaican girl. However, those three turned out to be some of the most horrible, offensive, stereotype-ridden representation I've ever seen (which has to mean something, because it's not like there's an abundance of awesome rep out there.)
Damien is soft-spoken and feminine, interested in fashion and cross-stitching - which, in itself, is fine. What's not fine is the blatant homophobia seeping through these pages:
"And this is the token guy in our group, Damien Maslin. But he's gay, so I don't really think he counts as a guy."
Wooooooow. Thanks, Stevie Rae, for reinforcing the notion that gay men aren't real men. What the literal fuck?
Or, three pages later, the actual use of the f-word:
"'Think National Merit Scholar in charge of the Honor Society mixed with cheerleaders and band fags.'
'Hey, isn't it disrespectful to your gayness to call them band fags?' Stevie Rae asked.
'I'm using the word as a term of endearment,' Damien said."
Using a term that originated from gay people being rolled up in carpets and lit on fire, therefore resembling cigarettes - which are widely known as fags in the UK - as a term of endearment? I think my spirit just fucking launched itself into the sun or something. This is some Grade-A-Straightie nonsense.
Shaunee, the Resident Black Girl, is only described in terms of food: latte macchiato, mocha, you name it. Anything edible that remotely resembles the color brown immediately becomes a substitute for her name. The bar is literally on the floor and the Casts dug a hole to avoid it.
The stereotyping continues in a rampage of slut-shaming: Zoey's really thinking about Aphrodite's sex life a lot. I mean, the words "bitch" and "hag" make up 81 % of her vocabulary, and there's this lovely paragraph to further prove how saintly Zoey is:
"Yes, I was aware of the whole oral sex thing. I doubt if there's a teenager alive in America who isn't aware that most of the adult public think we're giving guys blow jobs like they used to give guys gum (or maybe more appropriately suckers). Okay, that's just bullshit, and it's always made me mad. Of course there are girls who thinks it's 'cool' to give guys head. Uh, they're wrong. Those of us with functioning brains know that it is not cool to be used like that."
Right. Because giving a blow job makes you morally bankrupt and sucks out your brain cells.
WRITING STYLE: 0 / 5
I, a writer with at least seven years of experience, can think of approximately zero words to describe the style which P.C. and Kristin Cast employ in their opening novel of the House of Night-series. All I can say is that there are so many parentheses. (Seriously, so many.)
Instead of trying to describe it, though, I decided to compile a list of quotes from the book for both your and my amusement. (FYI, the little blowjob-excerpt was not from a conversation Zoey was having. It was an actual descriptive passage in the text.)
Behold the beauty of words, employed by the Casts in the House of Night-series in a manner formerly (and thankfully) unbeknownst to mankind:
"I guess it was time I took things into my own hands (after all, they were well manicured)." Okay, Zoeybird, do I look like I give a flying fuck about your fingernails?
"Then I felt it. A tingling sensation that crawled over my skin and made my new Mark burn. Power. I felt power."
This chick is really trying to be some cheap version of Harry Potter with her tingling sensation nonsense. Somewhere, J. K. Rowling is pissing her pants laughing.
"'Isn't that weird? I'm a Redbird and a daughter of the sun, but I'm turning into a monster of the night.' I heard myself talking out loud and was surprised that my voice sounded so weak, especially when my words seemed to echo around me, as if I were talking into a vibrating drum."
She hears herself. Talking. To herself. I'm going to have a stroke.
"Suprise made me open my eyes. I was staring up at a light, which miraculously didn't hurt my eyes. Instead of the glaring light of the sun, this was more like a soft rain of candlelight filtering down from above. I sat up, and realized I was wrong. The light wasn't coming down. I was moving up toward it! I'm going to heaven. Well, that'll shock some people. I glanced down to seemy body!"
I just lose it at that overly enthusiastic and super shocking my body! at the end there every. Single. Time.
Or, my all-time favorite, unparalleled in its astonishing phrasing:
"I enjoyed the way the world looked, sparkling and new, but it was my body that kept drawing my attention. I floated closer to it. I was breathing in short, shallow pants. Well, my body was breathing like that, not the I that was me. (Talk about confusing pronoun usage.) And I/she didn't look good. I/she was all pale and her lips were blue. Hey! White face, blue lips, and red blood! Am I patriotic or what?"
I'm delighted. Thanks for the confidence boost, guys, because if a book that uses the terms "gihugic" and "birthday-cake-frosting-blue" can make it, I probably can, too.
OVERALL RATING: 0 / 5
Man, I really tried to find something good about this book, but if such a thing exists, it's hidden awfully well. I don't know which illiterate demon possessed twelve-year-old me and told me these books were good, but I'm glad he's gone now.