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Blood Oath (Nathaniel Cade, #1)
by Christopher Farnsworth (Goodreads Author)
by Christopher Farnsworth (Goodreads Author)
Blood Oath is a great book, but let’s just get this out of the way first – If you’re looking for a deep, moving, original literary work, do not look here. Blood Oath is a rip-roaring, violent, and ridiculous action novel, and a good one at that.
The plot is totally derivative, the opening almost followed Hellboy to the letter as young and upcoming White House staffer Zach is inducted into a secret branch of government tasked with fighting the supernatural, their secret weapon? Blade- I mean Cade the domesticated vampire.
There’s even an aging mentor, keeping his terminal cancer from Cade, and an irritant in the form of the whiney vice-president Wynam, I almost expected Cade to have a thing for kittens and a crush on a pyromaniac.
In terms of plot Blood Oath is very much designed as the first in a series. We are introduced to several antagonists including an immortal Nazi mad scientist (Hellboy again), the mysterious ‘Control’ and another Vampire, Tania, a badgirl who has a thing for Cade.
Most of the novel is spent building the back-story of these characters and there is merely enough action provided to keep us reading, luckily Farnsworth shows a knack for action-novels so this book is worth it.
There are a couple of frustrations, one of the characters Dylan seems to exist only for Cade hunt down in the final pages as a cheesy ending, which doesn’t justify the number of chapters devoted to him. And there are some rather unfortunate writing techniques such as the simile in one chapter “ran like a spastic”.
Given lines like that Farnsworth rightly won’t be winning any awards for his prose, however there is some skill shown in this book, Farnsworth is able to deftly switch between characters in third person without giving us the feeling of being a fly on the wall and providing us with each character’s unique perspective, even in a work of cheese like Blood Oath, this style of writing takes some talent.
Blood Oath is definitely a boy’s book, one for the gory vampire lovers not the sparkly ones. I eagerly await the next installations.
The plot is totally derivative, the opening almost followed Hellboy to the letter as young and upcoming White House staffer Zach is inducted into a secret branch of government tasked with fighting the supernatural, their secret weapon? Blade- I mean Cade the domesticated vampire.
There’s even an aging mentor, keeping his terminal cancer from Cade, and an irritant in the form of the whiney vice-president Wynam, I almost expected Cade to have a thing for kittens and a crush on a pyromaniac.
In terms of plot Blood Oath is very much designed as the first in a series. We are introduced to several antagonists including an immortal Nazi mad scientist (Hellboy again), the mysterious ‘Control’ and another Vampire, Tania, a badgirl who has a thing for Cade.
Most of the novel is spent building the back-story of these characters and there is merely enough action provided to keep us reading, luckily Farnsworth shows a knack for action-novels so this book is worth it.
There are a couple of frustrations, one of the characters Dylan seems to exist only for Cade hunt down in the final pages as a cheesy ending, which doesn’t justify the number of chapters devoted to him. And there are some rather unfortunate writing techniques such as the simile in one chapter “ran like a spastic”.
Given lines like that Farnsworth rightly won’t be winning any awards for his prose, however there is some skill shown in this book, Farnsworth is able to deftly switch between characters in third person without giving us the feeling of being a fly on the wall and providing us with each character’s unique perspective, even in a work of cheese like Blood Oath, this style of writing takes some talent.
Blood Oath is definitely a boy’s book, one for the gory vampire lovers not the sparkly ones. I eagerly await the next installations.
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