I know you’re jealous of my castle.

77. The Fifth House of the Heart – Ben Tripp

Vampires and antiques make soooooooo much more sense as a combination than vampires and teenage girls. So much more sense. Vampires being nostalgic little dragons of treasure hoarding, extremely hard to kill, and easy to have a conversation with in basically one instance if you’re an antiques dealer who gives a shit about the quality craftswork of the past – it’s like someone finally paid attention to what happens when people get old. Most of them aren’t really focused on listening to teens be dramatic.

Granted, in this volume, vampires are what they eat so to speak, so the toad one couldn’t talk about his hoard and sometimes older humans are fond of young humans because they have like promise or whatever; but for the most part, The Fifth House of the Heart just rings much more true than vampire stories typically do. “I’m 5000 years old, please tell me about how hard your math test is and that you were embarrassed through fleeting and ever-changing technologies,” just doesn’t work for me. “Let’s talk about that Caravaggio I have that no one’s seen for hundreds of years so you can be jealous of my immortal collecting powers and how I don’t have to work to acquire such things,” sounds like real evil being talk to me.

And I haven’t even said anything about the main character, Asmodeus Saxon-Tang. Well, let’s just say I named my recently acquired red fox skull after him. He’s fun.

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Danger Crumples was grumpy during his last pumpkin photoshoot, he would’ve rather been photographed surrounded by his massive collection of toys.