Michael Marano

I admit I wasn't sure exactly what I was getting into when I started Dawn Song. I knew it was about a succubus, and with the cover depicting her floating, upside-down, and nude; I wasn't entirely convinced it was anything more than just an urban fantasy/romance with a focus on dark eroticism. Well, I was pretty far off.

Dawn Song can easily pass for a simple horror story. Within its dark atmosphere you have all the workings of a leisurely romp in horrorville - an erotic siren luring men to show more their deaths with her profound beauty, demons vying for the souls of humankind, and characters struggling with their sanity in a brutal, discriminatory city in a war-torn country gone mad.

But what Michael Marano offers is much more than 'just a horror novel.' The prose is beautiful, poetic, and rippling with descriptive metaphor that brings to life the bleak, wintry time the book is set in. The writing really deepens the dark emotion already present in the storyline, and I found myself lured by the book like a helpless man to a succubus. His writing, in my opinion, is quite spectacular.

I did have a few minor problems with the novel, I'm afraid to say. I had a hard time keeping track of the characters early on, as there are so many of them and not all of them are terribly distinct at first, although by the end of the novel I was quite familiar with them and cared very much about their well-being! Some of the characters are abandoned suddenly in the middle of the book, which left me wondering whatever might have happened to them, and similarly, the ending felt a bit more inconclusive than I would have liked.

I might not recommend this book to everyone, but if you like the genre then I would definitely say it is worth a try, if not only for the writing. It's a good book, all-in-all. Give it a try, if you like. show less