(Red Dice + Phantom)
Author: Christopher Pike
ISBN: 978-144-490-0514
RRP: $18.99
Red Dice picks up where Black Blood leaves off and it sucks you straight back into Alisa’s world. A world that seems to get even more fantastical with every chapter. It retains the easy to read style, the savagery, the coldness of the first volumes and it brings more history, more religion, more how Sita came to be who she is today. All of this makes for an involving read that captures you and enthralls you right from the very first paragraph and holds you in a deathgrip until the final scenes play out.
Today I managed to tune out the real world to a greater extent than normal simply because I had to see what Alisa ended up embroiled in next. I was thinking as I came to write this that she almost gets herself in as many predicaments as Lestat from Anne Rice’s Vampire series. And now that I have finished Phantom I am eagerly anticipating the final volume, I would love to start it straight away.
Red Dice begins with Alisa and the newly transformed Joel still in the horror house, base camp of the recently exterminated evil Eddie Fender. Alisa is determined that this spree of death and senseless violence end here and all remnants of the freshly truly dead Eddie are completely obliterated to ensure that this can not be repeated. Little does she know, this is the least of her problems and things are going to get much harder before they get resolved. Joel is an FBI agent, he worked with people and he had told them a little too much.
So again we journey through Alisa’s present, simultaneously with Sita’s distant past as her memories are triggered and we learn so much more about the why’s of who she is. The body count rises again in Red Dice but always with a dose of Sita’s morality. Killing is not something she enjoys; but to protect her secrets and, she truly believes, the fate of humanity sometimes you have to spill a little blood – or a lot of blood in this case.
Red Dice has a fabulous theme of the human desire for immortality. What would modern science do if they had a real vampire in their labs? I think Red Dice is pretty close to the mark.
Phantom is, wow Phantom is something I’m struggling to find the words for. There is the strong theme throughout that when you finally get what you wanted the most you find that it’s not really what you want after all. Or that you immediately start missing what you gave up to get what you thought you wanted. And how you sacrifice when there’s no coming back only to discover that there is always a way back – if you can handle the price.
And Phantom, I don’t want to say too much because I don’t want to be a spoiler. Let’s just say that I found it very difficult to put down until I got to the very last page and I REALLY want to go looking for volume 3 so I can find out what’s going to happen next.
I devour books, vampires and supernatural creatures are my genre of choice but over the past couple of years, I have broadened my horizons considerably. In a nutshell – I love to write! I love interacting with a diverse range of artists to bring you interviews. Perhaps we were perfect before – I LOVE WORDS!