A year ago or so, I was introduced to a book called Peeps that promised to read unlike any vampire book I'd ever come across. At the time, I was in the middle of a vampire reading craze, only, I wanted books about the bad vampires. No more sparkly, homo-erotic vamps. I wanted the gnarly, malformed types that fed on humans with wild abandon. Peeps gave me a little of both, vampires that fed and those that were in control and hunted down the bad ones. It worked, and I enjoyed reading through it. It took the now-common disease-based theory regarding the spread of vampirism, melding it with a bit of history and a bit of folklore into something quite different.

The Last Days is a sequel to Peeps, though in many ways is a completely separate work. It's set in the same timeline and even has a few characters that make the transition across books, but its story is mostly at odds with the entire theme of Peeps, which was one of parasitic disease and how to combat it. Instead, The Last Days is mostly about a band, and maybe about the power of music and cooperative humanity, etc. etc. The heroes of The Last Days are Moz, Zahler, Alana Ray, Pearl, and the mysterious and dangerous Minerva. For the first two thirds of the book, vampirism is rarely mentioned, no characters from the prior book are seen, and the main impetus of the "series" is completely absent. Then for about the last third of the book it's just one quickly spun web about the was against the enemy...the end. The logical part of me wants to say that this was a poorly written way to tell a story. If he'd wanted to write the tale of a band forming and succeeding, with drama along the way, maybe he could have left the peeps (Westerfield's chic term for vampires), out of it entirely.

But the truth is, I enjoyed the underlying threat of what I knew would eventually happen, and despite the rushed ending, I think that on the whole, the book works, and the more I read through it, the more I wanted to finish it. Maybe that isn't the perfect way to write a story, but I think getting someone to finish is probably a pretty good goal, and getting them to enjoy the story is icing on the cake.

Plot weirdness aside, Westerfield knows how to write. He uses expressive metaphors, details his characters enough that they feel like characters, and manages to weave everything together cohesively despite the apparent chaos. In The Last Days, he switches character viewpoints every chapter. Not only that, but he does so in the first person the entire time. This seems like a very good way to tank your career as an author, and at the start I found it nearly too jarring to continue. However, once I settled in, I began to respect his ability to distinguish each character's viewpoint. The advantage of third person writing is that even though you can jump around into a dozen different characters' heads, you can always keep your general style and mood the same. With first person writing, seeing through the eyes of a specific character, thoughts and actions and viewpoints and even metaphors have to be catered to how that person would view or relate them. If you were looking through a dim-witted characters eyes, you could not write in a style that felt elegant and smooth. You'd have to dumb it down. Though none of Westerfield's characters are dim-witted, he does manage to filter the world through each of their different eyes successfully. This seems like a difficult task to me, and while he may not have done it perfectly, I think it an impressive accompishment that he succeeded at all.

It's strange anymore to see a series of books come crashing to a halt after only the second installment, and part of me wonders if Westerfield was under some type of contractual obligation to write two vampire books given the mostly rushed wrap up to the saga. Do I feel like any loose ends were left? Not really. The conclusion wrapped things up nicely, and I didn't have much to guess at afterwards. But it did feel rushed, like something that been building for two novels and then was suddenly over. But that's all right, I guess. Who says a series has to be a trilogy? The great thing about being an author is that you decide. Readers beware.