{"id":4924,"date":"2011-05-03T17:43:28","date_gmt":"2011-05-03T23:43:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=4924"},"modified":"2011-05-03T17:44:20","modified_gmt":"2011-05-03T23:44:20","slug":"i-dont-want-to-kill-you-by-dan-wells","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/i-dont-want-to-kill-you-by-dan-wells\/","title":{"rendered":"I Don’t Want to Kill You by Dan Wells"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>John Cleaver, teenage sociopath and demon hunter, has put his inner monster to work protecting his small town community from supernatural beings.\u00a0 But now, the head demon, known only as Nobody, has come to take him down.<\/p>\n

As if that weren’t difficult enough, the most popular girl in John’s class, Marci, has taken a liking to him–and he soon finds that he likes her back.\u00a0 What’s more, she’s not as weirded out by his obsession with the string of murders in their town–in fact, she’s interested in them too.<\/p>\n

Just as their young romance begins to blossom, however, a rash of teen suicides makes John wonder: why does he even try if the people he’s trying to protect are just going to throw their lives away anyways?\u00a0 To defeat Nobody, he must search within himself and find the answer.<\/p>\n

This book was awesome–like, Return of the Jedi<\/em> awesome–and I’m not just saying that because the author is a friend of mine.\u00a0 It brings the Serial Killer trilogy to a dramatic and satisfying conclusion.\u00a0 Dan Wells’s storytelling skills are amazing, and he puts them to good use throughout this book.<\/p>\n

The thing I loved the most was probably how all the major characters had to sacrifice something huge for the people they loved in order to overcome the evil forces at work in their lives.\u00a0 And the demons–whoa, they were pretty freaky.\u00a0 Supernatural freaky, yes, but in a way that was frighteningly true to life–even more so than the previous demons in the series.<\/p>\n

Wells has an excellent handle on character arcs, and he applies that here to the romance subplot with excellent results.\u00a0 The romantic aspect of the novel was both believable and gripping, and made the ending all the more emotional.<\/p>\n

If anything, though, I wish he would have played up the love triangle a little more than he did.\u00a0 No spoilers, but there were a couple of shifts toward the end that felt a little abrupt.\u00a0 Not too much, but I thought it could have been done better.<\/p>\n

This is definitely an urban fantasy, but one surprisingly close to the real world.\u00a0 Unlike Mr. Monster<\/em>, where the supernatural aspect came in halfway as something of a shock, I thought the supernatural and real world elements in I Don’t Want to Kill You<\/em> were blended almost perfectly.\u00a0 Not only was it clear from the beginning that both elements were going to be important, but the feedback loop between the two was handled extremely well.\u00a0 If I ever write urban fantasy, Dan Wells has certainly set a high standard to follow.<\/p>\n

All in all, a great book, one I highly recommend.\u00a0 If you enjoy urban fantasy or superhero stories, you’ll probably love this book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Cleaver, teenage sociopath and demon hunter, has put his inner monster to work protecting his small town community from supernatural beings.\u00a0 But now, the head demon, known only as Nobody, has come to take him down. As if that weren’t difficult enough, the most popular girl in John’s class, Marci, has taken a liking… Continue reading I Don’t Want to Kill You by Dan Wells<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[112,276,98,160,550,551,425],"class_list":["post-4924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-character","tag-dan-wells","tag-horror","tag-romance","tag-superhero-stories","tag-supernatural","tag-urban-fantasy","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-1hq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4924"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4937,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4924\/revisions\/4937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}