Anna Dressed in Blood

I’m not usually a fan of horror books, but the gothic-surrealist cover art of this one drew me in.  What kept me reading, however, was the exciting plot, believable characters, and marvelous descriptive writing.  This is a scary, gory, but surprisingly affecting story.

 

Cas is a 17-year-old with an unusual calling: he’s a hunter and slayer of ghosts.  Some ghosts, we are told, have the ability to harm the living and it’s Cas’s job to stop them – permanently.  Since he began his dangerous career a couple of years earlier, all has gone more or less according to plan for Cas and his widowed, white-witch mother: move to a new town, track down and slay a ghost, then start the whole process over.  But that all comes to a halt when they fetch up in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where Cas must deal with an enormously powerful specter named Anna Dressed in Blood who challenges everything he thought he knew about ghosts.

 

Though the high body count and raw language make this a book for mature teens and adults, readers who wade through the blood and violence will also find a poignant story about friendship, belonging, and maybe even love.