Over Your Dead Body

March 7, 2016
Sympathetic and insightful teen sociopath John Wayne Cleaver battles literal external demons as well as his metaphorical ones in the strong fifth entry (after The Devil’s Only Friend) in Wells’s contemporary horror series. After a confrontation with a powerful Withered demon, John and his team—reduced to his girlfriend, Brooke, and the rescued Boy Dog—are in pretty bad shape, but they continue their quest to track down and destroy the various Withered, despite their vastly reduced resources. Brooke’s possession by another Withered and the spirits of thousands of young women—including John’s erstwhile girlfriend Marci—is further complicated by Brooke’s recurring suicidal impulses. The fugitive trio journey to the unremarkable rural
community of Dillon, Okla., searching for a largely unknown Withered. John’s attempts to deal with his desire to kill, his contradictory feelings toward Brooke, and the mundane struggles of their nomadic existence make the tale much richer than a simple
monster vs. monster story. Agent: Sara Crowe, Harvey Klinger.

Starred review from April 15, 2016
John Wayne Cleaver, the boy who sublimates his homicidal urges by hunting down and destroying demons, returns in this middle volume of a trilogy. It's set about four years after the book that introduced us to John, 2010's I Am Not a Serial Killer; John is nearly a man now, a veteran demon hunter, and his missionor so he believesis nearly at an end. He and his companion, Brooke (a girl who has the souls of thousands of dead people inside her head), are closing in on what could be the last of the demons who killed John's family and destroyed his life. Now that he's finally coming to terms with who he is, with the murderous impulses that live inside him, the last thing John needs is a life-changing surpriseso, naturally, when the spirit of Marci, his demon-murdered first (and only) love, suddenly takes up residence inside Brooke's mind, John is thrown for a loop. Can he focus on the job at hand, now that Marci has returned to his life? For fans of the series, the book is a superlative must-read, although newcomers should probably start at the beginning. Still, this one's very fine indeed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)