I was disappointed with this having read other Dan Simmons' novels. I was predicting the clichés all the way through and sure enough they were all delivered, down to the friend who seems to be a traitor but was really working against the villains and dies helping the heroine, and the number one villain surviving at the end. And the helpful old gypsy woman who helps the heroine reach Vlad Tepes' castle at the end. Meanwhile massive plot holes are never addressed like why was the baby heir to Vlad abandoned in an orphanage so that the heroine could adopt him and then have to fight to get him back in the first place and the basis of the dénouement - that bombs have been built into the castle to blow up at the exact time all the bad guys are there years later - is completely unbelievable. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2023/09/review-of-children-of-night-by-dan.html ( )

This isn't the best book I've read. It's cheesy as hell. It's formulaic. I skip read over long sections of medical descriptions with my mind grinding out 'I don't carrrrre'. Then I skip read overly detailed action scenes because I honestly didn't care about a foot movement or the way that the pinkie finger laid on the bottom of the gun.

Where was the editor for this book? Did no one look at it and say, "Dude. No one cares about this medical shit. Let's talk about Vlad's life in the way back time a little more. That's interesting."

I am grateful that I can skip read. The book should have been good. It should have been a novelette. The main character should have been O'Rourke. He was interesting. Kate wasn't.

Kate was boring and she irritated the hell out of me. Her single minded callousness was awful. Especially in the way that she transitioned straight to "He's my son." No. He. Isn't. You took someone else's kid out of his homeland and culture to do medical experiments upon. Stop saying that he's your son. He isn't. Her ethics disturbed the hell out of me.

There's a real life reason that there are so many countries have stopped allowing the US to adopt out kids, no matter how destitute their conditions. Then these real life narcissists expect to be praised as a saviors. So much WTF. This book shows the delusion perfectly even though it wants to do the opposite. ( )

Here's a book about vampires, in fact, Dracula himself is wandering around, 500 years old and tired of life. It's only third vampire book I can remember reading and it's old enough to have been written before vampire literature had been reduced to a joke by Meyer et al. Like one of the other vampire books I've read, My Name is Legion, vampirism is treated as a disease - in this case a rare genetic disease - not contagious at all. The details are carefully worked out and plausible to this not overly knowledgable-of-biology reader. Hence shelve under SF as well as horror.

Most of that horror comes from the reminiscences of Dracula who is treated as being the real historical Vlad Dracula. These memories come from the known facts of his life and are sickening in away that made up horrors aren't - because real people suffered in their thousands.

The book is a competent story, if a little predictable (I guessed most of the twists and revelations) but was slightly disappointing in that I am used to Simmons being much more ambitious. This tale is of the scope of A Winter Haunting rather than Hyperion Cantos, Ilium-Olympos, Drood or The Terror.

Bonus plus point: no spell-breaking lit.crit. essays! ( )

George Ralph was the narrator. His abilities to use Eastern European accents such as Romanian, Budapest, etc., were very good, but he would forget during long passages to keep his accent going, and sometimes it would slip away and then come back. Otherwise he was very good.

I’m not exactly sure how this novel works in the three-book series Seasons of Horror, and I was terribly confused at the beginning of this novel because it had nothing to do with the third novel in the series, which I had accidentally read first last month. But it became fascinating as far as using science to describe vampirism and it’s effects on one baby named Joshua, and I was soon enthralled. And this novel kept me interested even with the really scientific medical jargon that was way over my head, throughout.
Unfortunately, after finishing this novel is seems that I have read the second novel (this novel) instead of the first, as I had intended. So I guess I’m working my way backwards, and will continue to do so since there is nothing else I can do. And since I’m enjoying them all, I don’t even care.

4 stars, and recommended. ( )