NAL Trade; Reprint edition, 2011
ISBN-10: 0451232917
Available: New
Ghost Town is Book Nine of Rachel Caine’s Morganville Vampires series. The series takes place in Morganville, a Texas town run by vampires, and the heroine is Claire Danvers, a young student who is attending Texas Prairie University. The series is notable amongst YA vampire fiction, as the vampires are the ‘bad guys’ (or, at least, uncomfortable allies of the humans). So far in the series, Claire has come to terms with the vampiric ownership of the town, struck up an alliance with the town’s founder and most powerful (female) vampire, joined in a war against an ancient and utterly immoral vampire, defeated a sentient steampunk computer, and fought a town full of ‘infected’ (i.e. zombie) vampires. Additionally, she has made friends with her older housemates, survived bullying by a malicious ‘queen bee’, fallen in love, and lost her virginity. As such, the series covers a wide variety of the tropes of urban fantasy and YA fiction, with some flair and originality. Claire is a younger heroine, by the genre’s conventions, beginning the series at just 16 years old. The sensitivity and care with which Caine handles her heroine’s age means that these books are suitable for mid-teen readers, as well as older readers.
The Morganville Vampires books are very much a series, with each book ending on a cliffhanger, which is picked up at the beginning of the next. For this reason, readers who enjoy one book tend to become ‘hooked’ on the series as a whole. Ghost Town follows on from Kiss of Death (Book Eight), and also picks up narrative threads from earlier books. It focuses on a new problem for the humans and vampires of Morganville: they begin to mysteriously lose their memories. Claire, who is unaffected, must discover whether this is the result of the vampire disease that plagued the town in previous books, or of the destruction of malfunctioning sentient computer Ada (which ended Book Eight).
Ghost Town has fewer episodes of fighting and peril than some of the earlier Morganville Vampires books, and is somewhat slower in pace. However, its exploration and development of Claire’s character is done particularly well. Throughout the series, much has been made of Claire’s young age relative to those around her. One of the strengths of the series (as compared to much other YA vampire fiction) is the frank and sensitive way in which the heroine’s age is handled – and the condemnation offered to hundred-year-old vampires (whether or not they look like teenage boys) who date human girls. Ghost Town offers a nice counterpoint to this. As Claire’s friends lose their memories and regress to age 15, Claire becomes the ‘oldest’ and most mature of the group. This is a nice, and quite unusual, twist in the standard characterization of YA vampire fiction. While Ghost Town is not the strongest of the Morganville novels, it is a must-read for those who have followed the series thus far.
Ghost Town is recommended for purchase, and belongs alongside other YA vampire titles.
Contains: Some sexual references.
Reviewed by: Hannah Kate