Okay so I read this series about 5 years ago now and don’t remember a lot of it really well. I sat down to write up a few lines about it after seeing that a friend was reading it but as I did I kept remembering cool plot points/characters that I felt obligated to mention. Anyway I remember reading this series when I was about 13/14 and really liking it (all of the disembowelling helped :D). Note: This is marketed as Young Adult but… it isn’t. At least it’s not what you’d normally expect from the genre. You should really not let your kids read this if they’re under, say, 12 and probably older still. I’ve legits never read a book/series with more detailed descriptions of scenes of horrific violence and gore. This review will cover the whole series however I’ll try to keep any important plot points from later books in spoiler tags. Aaaaand... LORD LOSS, the Demon Lord. I personally think that he resembles Voldemort in the way he speaks, calm but harsh. As a massive fan of the Darren Shan saga I had high expectations for this series, I was pleased to discover that the first book - Lord Loss well and truly lived up to all of these! A suprise in a way that it was so uniquely different from everything I have ever read that I found myself reading it entirely through in the one sitting. I was not able to put it down. I must say, I do still find that my favorite of Darren Shan's series is The Darren Shan Saga, but only one book in it would be a little biased of me to be saying this. At the moment, I will be most certainly rushing out to buy the books after this one, a deffinant must-read for all fans of horror. Grubbs Grady lives with his chess-obsessed parents and sister, Gret. After pulling a prank on her, he's grounded. But after a while, his parents end his grounding early, and he gets treated special. When his parents and Gret go out, he's knows something's going on. He sneaks out of his aunt's house, goes home and finds his parents and sister dead, horribly and gruesomely murdered. The killers? Demons. I wait five minutes, until I hear Frank Sinatra crooning - no-date Kate loves Ol' Blue Eyes and always manages to find him on the radio. When I hear her singing along to some corny ballad, I slip downstairs and out the front door.

Yup. That guy after whom the book was named upon, and his two familiars Artery and Vein. HE ESCAPES THEM. Demon Thief book two of the Demonata by Darren Shan is a as good as book one Lord Loss but maybe with a more enjoyable story. I really liked the world and the characters that Shan created in book one of the Demonata. In the Demon Thief, Darren Shan makes a bold choice to set this book 30 years in the past to the events that take place in Lord Loss. Not only is it a prequel it is not really about Grubbs, or his family, but Uncle Dervish does have a role. The head's office. Me, Mum and Mr. Donnellan. Mum's ranting and raving about cigarettes. I've been seen smoking behind the bike shed (the oldest clich�� in the book!). She wants to know if the head's aware of this, of what the pupils in his school are getting up to. Studying my hair in the mirror. Stiff, tight, ginger. Dad used to be ginger when he was younger, before the grey set in. Says he was fifteen or sixteen when he noticed the change. So, if I follow in his footsteps, I've only got a handful or so years of unbroken ginger to look forward to.The first quarter was pretty gross. The protagonist, Grubbs Grady is a spoiled kid(or so I think) is caught smoking. His mom is furious- blah...blah...blah.... He gets off. There's violence and gore - from someone dead being used as a finger puppet, to beheadings, and even a bizarre story about the original owner of the house getting rid of a baby he didn't want by feeding it to his pet piranhas. It's not continuous, but it's brutal in the scenes which are meant to be horrifying. Of course these scenes hold up strong in their tensions. You never know what the author will pull out of his hat, after all. The landing. Not as cold as downstairs. I try my bedroom, then Gret's. Empty. Very warm. The chess pieces on Gret's board are also missing. Mine haven't been taken, but they lie scattered on the floor and my board has been smashed to splinters. In Lord Loss, the title character is first seen killing the family of our protagonist, Grubbs, accompanied by Vein and Artery. Using his power to cure lycanthropy, a game of chess is instigated against him by Dervish. Dervish rushes to save Grubbs when he's threatened, then Grubbs takes his place and makes a bad game worse. But once he notices that Lord Loss is feeding off his misery and desperation, he puts on a disinterested façade and storms to victory. Because of Grubbs' insults to both the game of Chess and Lord Loss himself, Lord Loss vows to make the Gradys suffer, a vow that intensifies in venom as the series progresses. My stomach tightens with fear. I ignore it, jog at a steady pace, and try spitting the taste of cod-liver oil out of my mouth.

I went in thinking it was going to have no connection to the first book at all and was very excited to see familiar characters, but in a different time... Which made me feel as though I read the wrong book first! That feeling soon went away though.I stop laughing instantly - a mouthful of rotten rat guts wasn't part of the grand ��ber-joke! "Get off!" I roar, lashing out wildly. Mum and Dad suddenly recover and shout at exactly the same time. Don't make jokes like that!" Dad snaps with unexpected venom. I stare at him, hurt, and he forces a thin smile. "Sorry. Hard day at the office. I'll arrange it with Kate, then." Although I struggled with character descriptions, for example not really knowing Kernel's age or what he looked like much and the harsh way characters like Raz was described, I thought the storyline Shan went for in this second novel was really interesting and unique and left me more emotional than I was ever expecting to be. Especially when the demon thief was revealed!