The Vampire Next Door by JT Hunter is a true crime novel that covers the bizarre case of the Vampire Rapist. While an interesting read, this one unfortunately wasn't my favorite book by Mr Hunter.

I had previously read JT Hunter’s novel, Monster Of All Time: The True Story of Danny Rolling, for another blog tour. So when this one was announced, I signed up immediately!

Full disclosure: I was given a free copy of this book by the author as a participant of the Partners In Crime Book Tour in exchange for an honest review. This did not affect my rating in any way.

First things first, this one covers sex crimes and it doesn’t shy away from the horrible details, so if that’s a trigger for you, you’re going to want to skip this one!

When the book begins, it’s formatted like a fiction novel as we saw the killer committing various acts. Then we jump to chapters focused on the victims. One specifically is a woman that managed to get away. After seeing her narrow escape, we then take the time to learn all about the killers childhood, young adult life, and the part of his adult life when before things took a darker turn. Then we’re back with the victim that got away as she’s in the hospital… From there, I couldn’t put the book down!

Just like the other book I had read by JT Hunter, I really appreciated all of the information that was included because it really told the full story rather than just focusing on the bad guy. We were given background information about the murderers childhood and plenty of information about his actions. We read the horrific details about the murders and saw some evidence photos. We also followed the court case and what happened to the man once he was in jail. But we were also able to see the impact on the victim’s families and the one woman that was able to get away.

It was absolutely heartbreaking. What a nasty set of crimes! This book certainly made my blood boil and I found many sections to be very difficult to read based simply on the crime. Because of this, I really appreciated the more fictionalized sections that both got us in the mind of the killer, but also broke up the non-fiction elements.

Beware, the negatives
I did have a few small items on my list of things I didn’t like about the book.

The main one was that it was very repetitive. Toward the end especially, I found myself skimming certain sections because we were going over things that we had already gone over a few times before.

I also didn’t really care for most of the other news items. While a couple helped to explain why the news of this guy wasn’t front-page news, the rest were thrown in in a way that didn’t make sense to me and just took us out of the story.

If I had to choose one of his works over the other, I would definitely recommend A Monster of All Time over this one.

My Favorite Passages
And yet, despite his seemingly harmless appearance, a creature of darkness had made the Sunshine State his home. For more than two years, unbeknownst to his Malabar neighbors, a vampire had been living among them, concealed as one of them, hidden in plain sight in an unobtrusive house next door.

My Final Thoughts
The crimes that this book covered were horrific, but I loved how the author organized and presented all of the information in a way that didn’t shine all of the light on the monster.

If you enjoy true crime, and don’t mind a little repetition, this is one I would recommend to you.