This book isn't part of one of my usual genres, and I generally wouldn't touch books with it's cover art/Amazon description with a 15 foot pole. It sounds and looks like the setup for some tragic, overly affected take on Twilight.
But it's not. The plot is shockingly not full of holes (though there are some questions left unanswered, they aren't *unanswerable*), the actions of the characters are actually justifiable, and there isn't any awful fixation on the romance elements - which are sparse, as they should be. It's a story that includes vampires and werewolves, and those two concepts are the most sexual metaphors imaginable, and McGreevy seems to recognize that (and even manages to make a bit of self-referential fun of it). The story is good, and good enough to recommend the book based on. I watched the Netflix series, and it was also good - it followed the story (and in some cases the dialogue) closely, and the acting was good, so if you enjoy this book I'd definitely recommend it.
The story is good and manages to hover above cliché, sometimes even lambasting it. This isn't a happy tale, nor does it come to a contenting conclusion. One thing that the story does manage to handle very well is the juxtaposition of technology and magic - a technical challenge that seems inevitable for the genre (though as I said I'm no genre expert). There's "magic" in the story, no doubt about that, but it's exists in a naturalist sense rather than a romantic one. While the characters take the "magic" elements they can see at face value, there's a lot of discussion of other supernatural elements that are clearly taken as metaphor (for those who have read the book, the story Peter tells Letha is a good example). It pays homage to Frankenstein in a fairly neat albeit direct (Shelly? Like Marie Shelley? What a coincidence!) way, and the two doctors (one a morally obsessed but inadequate psychiatrist, one a power-mad researcher) play into that homage well.
The writing is interesting. A number of comments seem to think that the author should have hired a better editor. I'd respectfully suggest that they're not familiar with stream of consciousness writing. McGreevy's obviously borrowing a number of elements of his technique from the modernist writers. If you're completely uncomfortable with phrases like
"That is, most of a girl named Brooke Bluebell."
"Missing her exactly like he used to."
"Lost in her own thoughts."
Each one of those fragments and countless others appears in the text, capitalized and punctuated like a real sentence. I don't see them as editing mistakes, though, since they're clearly intentional. If that's the sort of thing that bothers you, though, you're probably not the kind of person who does a lot of reading anyway.
There are also several instances where dialogue continues (with no scene description) for a few (short) pages at a time. These are not the norm: most of the book is very concise, and there isn't a lot of extra dialogue. There really isn't a lot of extra anything: everything that happens in the almost 13 hour television series and more happens in this book's short 318 pages. There's something to be said for conciseness, and it works fairly well here. The author keeps you in the dark about at least a few things throughout the book and occasionally things are somewhat unclear due to the sparseness of the text.
There are certainly some flaws in the book, plot-wise. *SPOILER ALERT**SPOILER ALERT**SPOILER ALERT* A handful of characters that readers should care about have almost no development at all. Christina's friends, the totally forgettable twins, are an example, as are all of the show's major victims. Aside from that, Pryce is a particularly uninteresting character when he had so much potential to be the opposite (and muscular hypertrophy? really?). On that note, everything about the White Tower seems weak and unrelated to the plot. Ouroboros has nothing to do with the werewolf killings, or anything the main characters care about. As Olivia puts it, the only important function the biomedical lab does is provides her family money - she's right not just for her own concerns, but for the concern of readers. *SPOILER ALERT**SPOILER ALERT**SPOILER ALERT*
Overall it's an excellent read in a genre I would normally never touch. It seems to be the author's only release, as well, which is promising. His website is essentially a placeholder right now, but I'll be checking back for certain.
