Hold Me Closer, Necro­mancer was a breath a fresh air in a genre I have gen­er­ally come to avoid.

Sam leads a pretty nor­mal life. He may not have the most excit­ing job in the world, but he’s doing all right—until a fast food prank brings him to the atten­tion of Dou­glas, a creepy guy with an intense vio­lent streak.

Turns out Dou­glas is a necro­mancer who raises the dead for cash and sees poten­tial in Sam. Then Sam dis­cov­ers he’s a necro­mancer too, but with strangely latent pow­ers. And his worst night­mare wants to join forces … or else.

With only a week to fig­ure things out, Sam needs all the help he can get. Luck­ily he lives in Seat­tle, which has nearly as many para­nor­mal types as it does cof­fee places. But even with new­found friends, will Sam be able to save his skin?

There were were­wolves, necro­mancers, witches, fairies, zom­bies, ghosts, talk­ing sev­ered heads. There’s noth­ing we haven’t really seen before and dare I say it, prob­a­bly noth­ing too orig­i­nal plot-wise either, but that doesn’t stop Hold Me Closer from being a great read.  There’s no angsty ‘true-love’. No ‘veg­e­tar­ian’ vam­pires. Best of all, Hold Me Closer doesn’t bother to take itself too seriously. There were lots of gen­uinely funny moments that had me laugh­ing loudly to myself. Like a demented person.

For­tu­nately, I read this one at home and not on the train.

Sam was a pro­tag­o­nist I instantly liked. Unlike the dev­as­tat­ingly hand­some, tor­tured, noble souls we tend to see in most YA para­nor­mal fic­tion, Sam is your aver­age guy. A bit of a loner, self-deprecating, and in all hon­estly, a bit use­less. Which I kind of liked. I enjoyed his ridicu­lous, and often times, hilar­i­ous, nar­ra­tive. I also enjoyed read­ing YA told (mostly) from a guy’s perspective.

Unfor­tu­nately, there wasn’t much a chance for the female char­ac­ters to take cen­tre stage in this book (hope­fully this will be resolved if Hold Me Closer becomes, as I hope it will, a series). Brid (awful name which I kept read­ing as ‘Bird’) had atti­tude. McBride intro­duces us to a strong, capa­ble, con­fi­dent woman and I admit I admired her style. It’s just a shame that there seemed to be lit­tle point to her char­ac­ter, other than pro­vid­ing a link to the wolves in the story and being the token love-interest. (Though I did appre­ci­ate read­ing about a fairly typ­i­cal, hormone-driven rela­tion­ship, rather than the ‘des­tined’ soul-mates we often see). I loved all the scenes with Brid in, I just wish we could have seen her have more of an indi­vid­ual role.

Dou­glas.. was a strange char­ac­ter. I know I should have found him creepy and ter­ri­fy­ing, but I didn’t. Clearly, he’s all kinds of crazy (and quite pos­si­bly a sadist) but he never seemed all that threat­en­ing. In fact, at times he seemed quite stu­pid. Sup­pos­edly he is the big bad in the super­nat­ural world, and every­one fears him, (though we never really see why), and he is con­duct­ing some ter­ri­ble research on super­nat­ural crea­tures. But what, I’m not quite sure. One major prob­lem with Hold Me Closer, is how every­one else on the super­nat­ural coun­cil (of which Dou­glas is a part of and all of whom are pow­er­ful beings), are appar­ently unaware of his extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties. Or that he is, very obvi­ously, up to no good. And no one does any­thing about it. It didn’t add up.

So some bits didn’t really make much sense, and there were sev­eral plot-holes (like how mag­i­cal crea­tures can just pop in and out of Douglas’s home where he is keep­ing impor­tant peo­ple hostage with­out rais­ing any kind of alarm). And it’s all a bit random. But… what can I say. I embrace the ran­dom. Sams rela­tion­ships with his friends and his bizarre, amus­ing, one-liners with his overly-personal neigh­bour made my day bright. It’s truly the char­ac­ters that make this.

Also, hello - necro­mancers!!! Very cool. Thank god someone’s capa­ble of writ­ing about some­thing other than vam­pires and angels. Although I do wish we had focused more on Sam actu­ally learn­ing the art of necro­mancy. C’est la vie.

Def­i­nitely a book for those who tend to avoid the para­nor­mal genre because they are tired of the dreaded Edward/Bella rein­car­na­tions. Hold Me Closer, Necro­mancer is funny, grounded, has some great dia­logue and is well-written with a delight­fully snarky tone. It’s com­pletely unre­al­is­tic — no one (apart from per­haps Sam, bless him) seems at all fazed by all the super­nat­ural crea­tures sud­denly appear­ing out of the wood­work. Everyone’s just like… huh. Okay. Want me to braid your hair? (To the dis­mem­bered head). The end­ing is a lit­tle too eas­ily wrapped up, I’m not sure the female char­ac­ters get the best deal (poor Brooke), and there’s far too many nar­ra­tives going on near the end but none of that really both­ered me. Because Hold Me Closer, Necro­mancer is just an incred­i­bly enter­tain­ing book. I read it all in one sit­ting. Also, (appar­ently) there are lots of music ref­er­ences, but I’m always pretty obliv­i­ous to that kind of thing and so only know this because of other reviews *ahem*. There is a lot of poten­tial here for a great series. Also, the title and the book cover are sim­ply awe­some. I liked it. A lot.

Plus, there’s a talk­ing cat. Which all books should have if they pos­si­bly can.

I screamed and grabbed a but­ter knife off the counter. I’m not sure what I planned to do with it, but in the mean­time I held it in front of me just in case Brooke sud­denly grew her body back and attacked. I mean, if she could talk, what was stop­ping her from leap­ing up and gnaw­ing piranha-style on my ankles? Once a sev­ered head talks, lifes’ pos­si­bil­i­ties seem endless.

Frank ran and hid in, I think, the bathroom…

I closed my eyes. Had to be my imag­i­na­tion. There was no sev­ered head on my floor. I opened my eyes. Brooke was still there, only now she looked dis­gusted with all of us. Frank ran in from the bath­room and started throw­ing assorted toi­letries at her.