“Never trust fairy tales. Any story that ends with “They all lived happily ever after” is a corck. There are no happy endings. No endings, full stop. Life goes on. There’s always something new around the corner. You can overcome major obstacles, face great danger, look evil in the eye and live to tell the tale – but that’s not the end.”

God of all things gruesome and gory, Darren Shan, returns with his highly anticipated third book in the Demonata series; “Slawter”. Readers of “Lord Loss” and “Demon Thief” will be familiar with the story of Grubbs Grady whose family has been decimated by an unfortunate inherited trait…

“Slawter” sees Grubbs and his uncle Dervish visiting the set of horror movie producer David A (more correctly Davida) Haym’s latest cinematic epic. Frustrated by obvious simulations of monsters, Haym has resolved to avoid such falsity in this work-in-progress.

Shan delights in pushing ideas to the absolute extremity, his demons are bizarre apparitions with fire in their eyes and snakes in their bellies. A burlesque romp about movie-making, there are few surprises in this story’s subtleties and narrative nuances are pretty much non-existent… Despite this “Slawter” remains curiously compelling, the interplay between the over-arching story and the meta-narrative of the movie creates that level of verve and vitality that Shan’s readers expect as standard. The movie dimension to the novel is entirely convincing as the prose is incredibly visual making this a perfect book to entice less confident or keen readers who will be left with a murderous appetite for more...

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