When reviewing a vampire novel, it would be all too easy—and rather tempting—to begin with a lengthy diatribe railing against the current state of vampire fiction, how that damned Stephenie Meyer and her sparkling blood suckers have dragged the genre down from the rather elevated status it once enjoyed. Fun, yes, but not entirely true. The genre had, in fact, found itself riddled with cliches long before The Twilight Saga came along.

She lives in a house surrounded by white teeth. The sound on the roof could be rain. A dragonfly nearing a gas station where the attendant smokes while pumping gas is an omen, an assurance that dragons will return, their scales a rattling subway train, their wings a flapping carnival tent. They will strike, as lightning once did, at the earth’s mantle, breaking it to reveal a molten core, waking bears from hibernation. No one will be able to sleep, but we’ll survive, she tells us, the skulls of newborns will still fuse, people will find themselves on volcanic land masses surrounded by unopened boxes. And the rain’s hard knuckles will beat us down. The signs are all around us.

Aaron Thomas Nelson's action/horror graphic novel Marlow has the distinction of being the first comic I've ever read in a digital format. I've been adverse to it since the inception of e-books, and especially when it comes to the comic medium. I still don't like it, but I sucked it up, and made a pleasant discovery along the way; I was able to get down and dirty with each panel, able to blow them up and still retain a high resolution image. This allowed me to get very intimate with the violent, corrupt world that Nelson and illustrator Matthew Reynolds created.