The Midnight Accords – Alex Gilbert

“A Journey of Black and Red” is the journey of Ariane, an early-nineteenth-century Louisiana teenager who became a vampire by being in the wrong place at the wrong time - and annoying the world’s oldest vampire. Most vampires in this milieu value ‘young’ vampires and protect them, but Ariane’s progenitor isn’t like most vampires, and those he turns have an extremely low survival rate. So she starts her journey with next to nothing. At the end of her journey she will either have made herself capable of saving the world - or she will have failed to do so. Book 4 centers on her transition from a lone vampire in hiding to a member of a larger vampire society.

This book does suffer from bad luck in chapter sequencing. Since the books are collections of sequential chapters from a web novel, book 4 starts after the last chapter collected in book 3 and continues for an approximately-book-length number of chapters. In this case, the resulting collection does not have a center of gravity. There is no unifying plot or theme. Think of it as having a bad case of middle-book syndrome.

The language in Journey is anachronistic, to the point where I find myself distracted from the pleasure of reading the story. Sometimes it is too-modern expressions - e.g., in this book “Ask not what you can do for your knight, but what the knight can do for you”, in the mid-nineteenth century. Sometimes it is too-modern habits of speech, such as the use of the singular ‘they’, which is just odd in that setting. Sometimes the language comes from modern technical usage - “test run”, “proof of concept”…

I was pleased to read this book. The web novel is coming out a chapter at a time, but I better enjoy it a book at a time. And sometimes the individual chapters are gems.