DNF. Can't believe anyone else did. ( )

Review coming soon on Sci Fi and Scary ( )

I don’t even know where to begin with this book! Blood Sugar by Daniel Kraus is perhaps the author’s tribute to Clockwork Orange. The characters speak in a street slang that is almost untranslatable at times. As the reader carries on, however, this thug lingo starts to actually make sense and an extremely creepy story is revealed. Basically a very troubled young man named Robbie has planned to dish out tainted candy to the trick-or-treaters and he has the help of three neighbourhood children.

The three children, Jody, Dag and Midget obviously hang out at Robbie’s because he supplies them with drugs, and pretty much lets them do what they want to do. These are very damaged children. Through Jody, the narrator of the story, we learn how terrible and heartbreaking the lives of these children are. As the day progresses, Robbie continues to plan to give out deadly treats but perhaps something or someone will change the outcome.

Blood Sugar was gross, depressing and sad. It was also extremely well written and clever. This is a book that I can’t really recommend to anyone, yet it is also a book that I will long remember. This is the second book by Daniel Kraus that I have read and I can assure everyone that this author is unique. ( )

Blood Sugar by Daniel Kraus is a unique book for the Hard Case Crime imprint, not only for the story, but for the narrative style in which it is told. The pre-teen/early teen narrator Jody is telling the story in a stream-of-consciousness style which all takes place on the day of Halloween, with flashbacks and occasional interjections of letters written by two of the other main characters. Jody’s voice is a combination of street slang, references to Tolkien novels, and a young person wanting to sound older and more important than he really is by using made up words or words he doesn’t really understand. This makes reading the story a bit difficult in the first few pages, but then you fall into Jody’s style and rhythm and understand how this underprivileged child sees and interacts with his world.

Jody, his younger foster sister Midget, and his female friend from a better part of town, Dag, all spend time on Yellow Street, a part of town that is being demolished block by block to build new homes for more affluent families. One of these old homes is where Robbie, a man in his early 20’s lives alone, as his parents have abandoned him, and it is Robbie who is the central character of Jody’s story.

Robbie was a young man with promise- a star high school football player - until a incident took his life in a direction from which he would never recover. Now, left behind by his parents, unable to hold a job, and despised by nearly everyone in town, Robbie concocts his revenge on everyone with the help of Jody and Dag, with Midget trailing along.

An unusual story, told in an engaging style, about a crime being planned by a group of wayward kids led by an unstable young man, each with their own motives and haunted by problems past and present. Not the best book in the Hard Case Crime series, but one worth the quick, engaging read. ( )

I found the storytelling style interesting. The story was expertly told with the right amount of dark subjects and childhood innocence and humor woven into the tragic life of a few neglected children. ( )