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Whew! This is a novel that spans from 500 BC to the present plus has characters who transform from one shape to another. The remarkable thing with that kind of range is that Book Two of the Chronicles moves fast and keeps the excitement strong. It’s filled with atmosphere, tension and layers of plot that will make your head spin (or at least keep pages spinning at night until you find out what will happen next). This is a fight on a cosmic level between good and evil, and those who were good and became evil against those who were evil and become good. I can’t imagine keeping all this straight during the writing, but does it beautifully.

The author is a self-professed Christian, and that belief (becoming saved) permeates the book. At first I thought that might be a problem. It seems like a fixed fight. After all, are you going to have evil win? And there certainly are good heroes like Jonathan Steel and villains, such as “Raven” the code name for Elizabeth Allen Poe. But there is also Josh, a high school kid whose mother died in the first book. He is a new Christian but a little disillusioned by his protector, Steel, and drawn back to a cult of vampires (one of which is his girlfriend, Ila). The book asks the intriguing question: Would someone renounce their faith to save another? There are some other colorful characters who add texture to the tale: a six-foot seven homeless man helping , the 12th Demon, Wulf, and a tough woman cop, Lieutenant Kane.

The action makes you dizzy and some of the metamorphoses are cinematic to say the least: “Vivian struggled in the grip of Wulf’s claws, snapping her head back and forth. She moved with a rapid, nightmarish staccato, and her face began to change. Her mouth widened and revealed a row of sharp teeth. Her hair writhed into black tentacles, and her arms become jointed, chitinous appendages. Huge, white orbs filled her eyes. She seemed a combination of creatures: the teeth of a shark, the limbs of a praying mantis, and the tentacles of a squid.”

Great dialogue, plenty of back story, a brief history of vampirism and even a snippet or two of theology (one character’s theory is that Satan originally dispatched twelve demons to counteract each of Jesus’s twelve disciples), plus a few little nuggets for those paying close attention (two of the young vampires are called “Spike” and “Stake,” Wulf’s pharmaceutical company is located in Romania (Transylvania)). The ending is a bit convoluted, but it leaves the door open for the next book. Whether or not this is your taste in reading (you should have an imagination that reaches well beyond the literal) you have to admire the prodigious mind that put all this on paper in such a though provoking, yet entertaining form. Now that’s miraculous!