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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Which Witch Will Bewitch You?, April 28, 2010
This review is from: The Last Apprentice: A Coven of Witches (Hardcover)
Just when I think Joseph Delaney's Last Apprentice stories can't get any scarier, he comes back and frightens me even more! A Coven of Witches is Delaney's second volume of short stories involving the characters that we see in the ongoing saga of the Spook's Apprentice Tom Ward. Teasing us with another intermediary volume of mini tales of terror that will scare the breath out of you, this book offers up some pretty gruesome, gross and gory vignettes starring the many witches of Pendle and Chipenden that we have met previously in the other seven installments.
This volume may be short of pages but is certainly filled to the brim with well penned horrifying adventures and vividly drawn illustrations certain to keep the chills and thrills of Apprentice fans begging for more! Bringing up past characters and accounts we've already been introduced to, we learn how John Gregory meets his love, the witch Meg Skelton and her evil feral sister Marcia. We'll watch how our adorable pointed toed witch girlfriend of Tom Ward, Alice Dean, gets her early dark arts training from aunt Bony Lizzie. Many witches of the Malkin, Mouldheel and Pendle clans will drip blood across these pages as they haunt, slay, slice and dice their prey, wreaking havoc across the English countryside giving the Spook and his Apprentice a run for their money. Headless witches, swamp witches, screaming banshees, child stealing, malevolent, and blood thirsty necromancers that rise up from the dead, will all have the reader jumping at those things that go bump in the night if they're turning these blood curdling pages in the dark by candlelight!
I'm 53 years old and The Last Apprentice teen horror series has never yet disappointed me or failed to give me 100% chilling entertainment. I love this series and really can't wait for the next book that will return us to the main agenda where Tom Ward and John Gregory have the feared Fiend unfortunately unleashed at last, threatening to consume all of mankind. Sensational read as usual, and a series no horror love should miss!
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Women with pointy shoes, May 7, 2010
This review is from: The Last Apprentice: A Coven of Witches (Hardcover)
The Last Apprentice series is full of witches -- good ones, bad ones, and horrifying ones. So unsurprisingly "The Last Apprentice: A Coven of Witches" is all about various witches in this series, ranging from a vampirelike dead witch to Grimalkin herself. Joseph Delaney's stories are solid, but be forewarned: one of these stories has been released in another book.
"Meg Skelton" takes us back to when Gregory was a young man: he fell in love with a beautiful young woman that he rescued from a monster -- only to find that she was a lamia witch. Though he tried to live peacefully with Meg, her feral sister Marcia and the suspicious townspeople ultimately made it impossible. "Dirty Dora" tells us of a grotesque undead witch who returns after death to visit revenge on the men who killed her.
"Grimalkin's Tale" tells how the fiery young assassin became the Witch Assassin, and why she wants to kill the Fiend. "Alice and the Brain-Guzzler" tells of the first week of Alice Dean's apprenticeship, and how she became the target of a deadly familiar who's eyeing her as his next victim. Finally, Tom encounters the "The Banshee Witch," a mysterious woman with a terrible cry who is far more than what she appears...
I'm 99% sure that "Grimalkin's Tale" was already released in another one of Joseph Delaney's short story collections, and that the big drawback to this collection. Well, that and the fact that there's no real ending to Gregory's doomed love story -- Delaney doesn't really explain what happened to Meg and Marcia after Gregory returned.
But the rest of it is pretty good stuff -- Delaney explores some of the backstories of the supporting cast, and includes a story about Tom's apprenticeship with Arkwright. His writing also varies from story to story, from the grotesque descriptions of graveyard dirt and moldy leaves to the swampy battles with a serpentine worme. As for the "brain-guzzler," that's just horrendous.
It also provides some interesting revelations about the characters. We see the horrors that drove Grimalkin to become a witch assassin, the toxic atmosphere that Alice learned witchcraft in, and some details about Gregory's naive youth. Dirty Dora is also explored in detail, but she's such a sly malicious old hag (and a sort of vampire!) that you can't really feel sorry for her.
"The Last Apprentice: A Coven of Witches" is all about the witchy horrors and some truly terrible magic -- I just wish Delaney had told us what happened to Meg and Marcia.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's really Book 6.5, September 30, 2011
I read this entire series in a flash and have absolutely LOVED it. I left this book until last because I'd heard it wasn't really a part of the full series...just some "additional backstory" on some of the characters. That's not entirely true. While the backstories of Meg and even Alice can be read after all the other books with no problem....it's the LAST story in this book that is integral to the plot of Book 7 Rise of the Huntress. There were elements of that book that I didn't quite understand. I thought I might have missed a few details in Book 6 because some of the details in "Huntress" didn't match up with where Book 6 had left off. Now that I read A Coven of Witches, the plot of Book 7 (especially the beginning chapters) make more sense. It's the last story in A Coven of Witches that is important to read BEFORE going into Book 7. That's why I call it Book 6.5. I loved having the backstories on Meg and especially Alice. I wish the book were a bit bigger and that Delaney had included the stories of other prominent witches of the series like Lamia and Wurmalde.
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