Alright this one, this one did it. It, it broke me. Okay, I, I, there are 12 books in the House of Night series and over the course of like two weeks I read the first half of them or read the first half. I listened to them audio book and they're, it's all sped up and I could do it while doing other stuff so it was super convenient. Yesterday I finished book six and I just decided, you know, at book seven onwards I'm gonna get them digitally from the library and read through them because I can, I can do it faster that way. I just have to, you know, focus on it. And I stayed up until 6am this morning reading all the, all the books just because I wanted it done. Okay, I wanted to take my notes, finish reading and then just record this and get it out of my mind because this is the worst series ever, okay?  House of Night is a mad collection of ravings, okay? Like, my immortal, you know, that terrible fan fiction I did a read through of not long ago, um, this feels like a story that Ebony Darkness Dementia Ravenway would write if she were a real person, okay? I'm not exaggerating when I say that. This, this has like a weird pseudo-gothic feel to it. There's the main character having sex with like 18 different dudes and it's all about how amazing she is just for the sake of being amazing. I'm really not exaggerating when I say that Ebony Darkness Dementia Ravenway could have written this, okay? And, um, it's just, um, it's, it's really bad. This is a long intro. Let's, let's get started. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. For context, before I really get into this, I just wanted to mention that Throne of Glass, the last one I did, which required three parts, which were almost three hours long altogether, and I did the math on that one. That series is around 4,400 pages altogether. And I had eight and a half pages of notes written down for it. House of Night, uh, even though it's a, there's more books in the series, the page count is around 3700, give or take. I have 13 pages of notes for that. Yeah, this whole thing in my notebook that, that is all House of Night stuff just to give you, give you an idea. And I know you're probably expecting me to play that clip from Twilight of Michael Sheen doing the funny laugh. I'm only going to play it once, and I need to save it for a good spot. So, um, anyways, let's get started. So House of Night, book one marked. So it starts off with a pretentious quote. It's all about Atlas holding up the sky. And like most pretentious quotes in terrible young adult stories, it doesn't tie into the actual story at all, so I'm not sure why it, uh, why it was put in at all. But then we're introduced to our main character, whose name is Zoe. Now, Zoe is at this point a regular 16-year-old high school girl who is just complaining about her geometry test. You know, she lives in Oklahoma, and she has a friend named Cal, and in her inner narration, cause it's from Zoe's POV, um, she's talking about how Cal is just this dumb girl. Like, she's obsessed with boys and makeup and that sort of thing. And so, according to Zoe, she's dumb, even though she thinks of her as her best friend.  You know, it's a great intro to our main character, you know, to have her insult her best friend and make her look like a terrible person. That's our introduction to this character. But don't worry, we don't have to spend long with that, because not long after that, like, in the middle of school, Zoe gets marked by a vampire. Now, this is one of the ideas in this series that it's not even a good idea that's executed badly, it's like the seed of a good idea. Like, if you were to alter what they did with it a little bit and then execute it better, then it might have been an okay story. MUT. Okay, no guarantees there. Or, hell, it wouldn't even have been a good story necessarily, but like, this part of it wouldn't have been as bad. But basically, in this world, vampires are public knowledge. You know, they've always been public knowledge. You know, from what I understand, True Blood also has a similar plot where vampires are revealed to the general public, but I've never read it or watched the show, so I can't really comment on that or if there's any similarities. But, yeah, vampires are public knowledge and you don't get turned into a vampire by being bitten or anything like that. Basically, you... some people just turn into vampires when they're teenagers, you know. Like, once they reach around 16, they start the transformation, they're referred to as fledglings, and over the course of the next couple of years they turn into full vampires. And the vamp that sees Zoe in her school and marks her, he's what's known as a tracker, so they like just go out and find kids that are about to turn into vampires. And it's never really made clear if they are the ones that sort of kickstart the process, or if the process was already there and the trackers just find them. I think it's the second one, but I'm not sure. But anyways, this guy very publicly outs her as a vampire and tells her, you need to go to the House of Night, and so she gets this weird tattoo symbol on her forehead, which is the mark of vampires. And this is one of the dumb parts of the series. Like, as they become closer to being full vampires, the marks grow and turn into tattoos that cover their whole bodies. Like, that is just so gothic and edgy.  So, apparently, even though vampires are known to the public, they don't interact with humans all that much, and humans see them as being kind of scary for really no reason. Like, we'll get more into that later, but the humans see them as being kind of scary and weird and out there because they're, I don't know, they're just vampires, so everyone at her school kind of immediately distances themselves from her.  I'm not gonna be able to see my friends anymore. I'm gonna have to go to the House of Night. That's a boarding school, and she's treating it like it's really far away. And, you know, you hear about the House of Night. It's a school where young vampires learn to control their powers and then enter vampire society and become these not immortal but very long-lived creatures of the night. You hear that and you might think, oh, this must be in some like abandoned castle in Romania or maybe it's a hilltop temple in the mountains somewhere in Alaska or, you know, somewhere far away.  Okay? And Zoe lives in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, which according to Google, that's an 18-minute drive away. So, there are places in my own city that take more than that to drive, and I still go to them regularly.  I also want to point out that despite having 13 pages of notes here, I wrote down maybe a quarter of what I could have because partway through the second book I realized that I just would not have time to hit on every little stupid moment or every little stupid line, and so I start skipping over more and more stuff so I can just hit the major plot and character beats. So, just keep that in mind as we go ahead that it might seem like these get better after the second or third book. They don't, trust me. So Zoe goes home to her mother, her older sister, her younger brother, and her stepfather, who she refers to as the step-loser throughout the story. And her father isn't really in the picture, like, I think they only mention him once or twice in the entire series, and they kind of just say that, like, yeah, he left us and I don't really talk to him anymore, which, um, okay.  That could be, you know, that could be interesting, it's just how parents are sometimes like that in real life, it sucks, but they aren't always like evil villains, they didn't always leave you to go off and become magical heroes or anything, sometimes they just leave. So that, whatever. Anyways, so everyone is angry at Zoe for turning into a vampire, even though it's not her fault, it's just a biological thing that happens sometimes, and her mom is super angry at her for some reason. And her stepfather is, apparently he's a very religious man, he's a leader in their local church, and he thinks that vampires are like the work of Satan or something, so like, Zoe's not religious enough, she's not following Jesus enough, and that's why. And also, as this is happening, Zoe is complaining about her older sister being a slut and having sex with lots of dudes, and Zoe reputedly refers to other women who have more than one boyfriend at, and not even at the same time, but like, if you're in more than one relationship, that she refers to them as sluts or hoes, and I just want you to keep that in mind as we go ahead, like, she even hates her own sister for this.   So when her stepfather hears about this, he tries to gather up people from their church to, as Zoe puts it, pray away the vampire, okay, which obviously it doesn't work because it's a biological thing, and yeah, I don't have anything else to say about that, it's just really stupid, and Zoe sneaks off to go and visit her grandmother. Now, her grandmother is a Cherokee, and throughout this whole series, Zoe is like, weirdly obsessed with Cherokee stuff, like she constantly refers, well maybe not constantly, but a lot of the time she refers to herself as Cherokee and refers to their rituals and their magic and everything, and it just feels weird and out of place, because it could have been a neat addition, but it just doesn't mesh with all this other vampire stuff and all this other magic stuff, and quite frankly, after the first, like, four books, I kinda kept forgetting that Zoe was a Cherokee, even though she kept bringing it up, it's weird. Okay, while she's at her grandmother's house, Zoe has this vision sort of thing where she meets Nix, and Nix is the goddess of vampire, she's the goddess of night, and Nix just tells Zoe, you're so special, you're destined for great things, you're amazing, and yeah, that's stupid, because we just barely have gotten to know Zoe, we've just barely gotten to know this world, actually we haven't gotten to know this world, because they haven't even really gotten into the vampire stuff yet, but we've barely gotten to know any of this, and we are already being told that the main character is special, she's a chosen one, and she's gonna do great things, and she's not destined for any real reason, you know, she doesn't save things by, you know, being a good leader, she doesn't save things by being hardworking, or determined, or intelligent, or anything like that, she's just, she's destined to do things, she's destined to be a hero, and we don't even know what she's destined to do at this point, we just know she's super special and cool, like that's the whole point the scene was put in, and so, from this point on, and I'll bring it up periodically throughout this, this is gonna be a long video, jeez, but throughout all of this, just remember that Zoe is totally a Mary Sue, and I don't use that term lightly, okay, I feel other people use it way too often, but in this instance, yes, Zoe is a total Mary Sue, because she's just chosen by God for no real reason, and as we go through this, you'll see why. Zoe passes out after her vision quest, or whatever you wanna call it, and she wakes up, she's already at the House of Night, which, as a brief aside, shouldn't the House of Night have like, a way for vampires to go to the school? Like, to be transported there, because, I mean, the tracker vampire that finds Zoe, he's never named, I don't think, and he just leaves afterwards, like he doesn't even give her a phone number or anything, like, hey, if you need to get to the House of Night, just call this number and a driver will come and pick you up, or something like that, that would make sense, because, you know, Zoe lives a 20 minute drive away, so it wouldn't be that hard to pack up her stuff and leave, but what if someone lived in, like, another state or something, and they mention there's multiple Houses of Night, sure, but what if you're still a long drive away and you just can't take the time to get there, like, whatever, that's a brief aside, and she passes out and wakes up at the school, and they're waiting for her, or, you know, her grandmother, who took her there, but also the high priestess of the school, the leader of the school, who's named Neferet, and Neferet just starts off by saying, you know, welcome to the House of Night, and then she gives a bunch of exposition and she starts off with, as you know, and there's really no worse way to let your audience know that you're just spewing exposition for their sake than by starting it with, as you know, because if she knows, why are you telling her? That's like me saying, as you know, Colorado is a part of the United States, like, yeah, no shit, why, if you don't know that, then I would just say Colorado is part of the United States, that's so stupid, and so anyways, Neferet goes into this whole long spiel about the vampires and about the House of Night, so basically it is a regular boarding school where vampires learn to control their powers, they have magic powers, you know, a lot of them have affinities for the five elements, you know, air, fire, water, earth, and spirit, you know, not all of them, but a lot of them do have that, you know, so they can use them for magic things, it's not really explained very well at this point, or for the rest of the series for that matter, but, you know, they can use magic things and cats are also apparently super attracted to them, you know, there's just cats wandering around and not long after this, a cat just goes up to Zoe and they become friends immediately, so, you know, that's cool and all, and apparently vampires have like internal clocks that tell them when it's day or night, so like, you know, you can wake up and be like, oh, it's like deep in the middle of the night, so I'm good, or you can be like, oh, dawn's almost coming, so I'm also good because vampires don't actually get hurt by sunlight in this, like, it's uncomfortable for them as they put it, but throughout this whole series, Zoe and them go out in the sunlight without much trouble, like, you know, Zoe will wear a hat to shave her head, great, but like, she doesn't even have to, well, they might have put on sunblock, I don't remember, and you can suck my dick if you think I'm going back to check, but basically, they couldn't have even done something like Cirque de Freak did where vampires are just really sensitive to sunlight, and so if they go out, and you know, full vampires, not half vampires, but if they go out, they have to wear tons of sunblock, otherwise they turn into a lobster, like, right away, and I'm not even done with page one of my notes. Okay, after Zoe is briefly introduced to The House of Night and all that, she goes out into the halls to find her room, and okay, okay, so she's out in the hallway, and there's only two people there.  She's like, trying to say, come on, you know you want it, that sort of thing, and he's like, no, come on, we're not together anymore, that sort of thing. And then she cuts him through his jeans and starts drinking his blood, and as Zoe is watching this, she says it, quote, reminds her of the girls who used to give guys blow jobs like they used to give gum, or more accurately, suckers.  Now, I bring that up, because those two characters both become pretty important to the series as this goes on. The first one is named Aphrodite, and we'll get into her later plenty, don't worry. The second one is Eric, and Eric is, at least at first, the main love interest of Zoe throughout this whole series. You know, a long time ago, like back when my channel had probably 30 subscribers, I read this terrible Wattpad story called Muslima Next Door, and you can check it out if you want. It's an old video, so the video quality is really low and all that, but in that story, it was basically just a Muslim girl in America who falls in love with this white non-Muslim dude, and the way they met in that story was that he was having a party at his house, and being really loud and obnoxious and all that, and so she went over and tried to tell him to calm down a little bit, and he holds up vodka in front of her face and starts trying to snare her off with it, like it's garlic to a vampire or something. And then not long afterwards, she goes home, and he throws a rock through her window, and it crashes and hits her in the head, and she has to be hospitalized. And that's the way the two love interests were introduced to each other in that story. I didn't think I would find a worse way for love interests to be introduced, but then I read House of Night, and the main love interests are introduced when the protagonist sees him being sexually assaulted by another girl in a hallway, and she looks on with confusion, disgust, and horror, and then sees him getting his blood drank, and she goes, ugh, and then leaves. That's worse. Apparently Aphrodite is the leader of this school group called the Daughters and Sons of Darkness, and it's never made clear exactly what their purpose is. Okay, they're definitely just like a social club, but what's their stated purpose, or their intended purpose, that's never brought up. And she really hates Zoe just because, I guess. She's like a bully mean girl, and so she just hates Zoe just because there's no real reason for that. And it's specifically mentioned that she looks like a combination of Sarah, Jessica Parker, and other celebrities, and that... Okay, I need to take a moment to talk about this series's world building because, you know, obviously I'm the world building guy, that's what I like to talk about.  Like, had it done something like what True Blood did, where vampires were only recently introduced to the populace, at least I think that's what True Blood is. Again, I haven't watched it, but had they done something like that, that would have been acceptable. But in this, the world is exactly the same, and they specifically make a bunch of mentions to other pop culture, pop culture icons and celebrities and such. Like Harry Potter, and they mention Game of Thrones a little bit at the end.  They confirm William Shakespeare, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kenny Chesney, Garth Brooks, and Jake Gyllenhaal, and possibly a few others I missed are all confirmed as vampires. And it's just, that makes no sense, because if there were these nigh immortal, powerful, magical beings running around, history wouldn't have unfolded the same. Okay, I'm amazed I have to keep pointing this out.  But Aphrodite refers to them as the nerd-herd, they're kind of outcasts, but honestly I don't see why. Like, totally normal people overall, they're just, they're outcasts because. But anyways, I bring this up because these are her main friends throughout the series and none of them are that important other than this girl named Stevie Ray. And we'll talk more about her later, but at this point she's pretty inconsequential. And the others have basically no personality.  And, okay, okay, so he's gay, but he's also like the nerd stereotype where he brings up obscure facts and knowledge all the time and tells the others about it.  And he's the only dude that hangs out with them. But at one point, while they're talking about this, one of her friends says, we don't have any guys that hang out here. And they're like, well, what about Damien? And she says, well, he's gay, so he doesn't really count as a guy. Which, yeah, that's pretty homophobic. I'll put that out there. And I mentioned that on Twitter a while ago and other gay people said, yeah, that's homophobic. So I'm not alone in thinking that.  Cool, whatever. Damien gives her more of a rundown of the school and apparently they're all divided into four grades, which are like third form, fourth form, fifth form, and sixth form. And I'm like, why not just call it first, second, third, and fourth years? Whatever.  And apparently they're also divided into like Harry Potter houses and I didn't write down the names here, so I don't remember them. And they never mention them again after this, but this is an important thing to mention because when I first started this and before I started it, it came out in 2007.  At this point I realized it's much more of a Harry Potter rip-off. You know, think about it, you go to a magic school where you learn magic and do things and you're split into houses and well, that's about it because, you know, in Harry Potter, you know, they're a magic school which is hidden from the world and all their classes revolve around like transfiguration and potions and stuff. Whereas in this, it's mostly just normal school stuff. Yeah, that's it. Like the only abnormal classes they mention are fencing, which admittedly does sound kind of cool. Like I wish I went to a high school that offered that. They have some brief magic classes, but they don't really learn to do anything cool with their magic. You know, they don't really learn to throw fireballs or transform into bats or anything like that, which would be cool. And then the other one is vampire sociology.   Like, because again, they don't really need to drink blood to survive, at least not at first. Like once they become full vampires they have to. They don't need to stay out of the sunlight and they can't really do anything all that cool with their powers. So really the only reason you'd want to become a vampire is because they live a lot longer. Like that's the only benefit I can see to this. And okay, I'm kicking this into overdrive because I'm less than a page and a half in. So Zoe complains about her boobs and about other people's boobs. And in my notes I wrote, just stop talking boobs in all caps. So, you know, give you an idea. And vampires are apparently matriarchal, which is weird because throughout this series it seems to be trying to give off some sort of girl power vibes, but it never does. I never really got that sense. I never really got the sense they were a matriarchal society either. It's just all the people in positions of power or women cool, but they don't mistreat men or anything, which that could be an interesting bit of social commentary if you had bothered to try even a little bit. But okay, and at this point we also learn that some vampire fledglings don't change they die. Their body will reject the change and so one day they'll just stop breathing and fall on the ground and convulse for a little bit and then they just die. Their body rejects the change. And again, that's one of the few ideas or seeds of an idea that could have been good if they did anything with it, but they don't. And so Zoe goes off and parties with Aphrodite and they pass around a thing of wine or Zoe thinks it's wine because she's a dipshit, it's wine mixed with blood and she's like, wow, this is amazing. And then she's like, wait, I drank blood? I thought that was not allowed and they're like, well, it's not from a human. It's from another vampire fledgling because they can drink other vampires' blood apparently. So then Zoe's old human friends attempt a rescue operation. It's weird. They kind of break into the school, go over the wall and then try to get her to leave and she's like, no, I actually kind of like it here for whatever reason because she really hates her friends all of a sudden. Like her old sort of boyfriend is named Heath and I bring him up because he'll be important after this. But Heath and she goes on these long anti-marijuana, anti-drinking tirades about him because apparently she hates that he drinks and smokes and okay, don't get me wrong, doing that sort of thing too much is definitely an issue but they don't really talk about it like he does it too much. They talk about it like he has beers when he's out with friends and granted he is underage so I'm not like encouraging that type of behavior. I'm just saying it's not really that big a deal. But anyways, while she's hanging out with Heath and them and telling them to leave she accidentally drinks some of his blood and then after that they leave and Zoe notices that she's changing into a full vampire a little bit faster and it might be because she drank some of Heath's blood, it might be not, whatever.  Wow, I did not think I was going to be saying that sentence today. And they talk a little bit and he's like, yeah I used to date Aphrodite but not anymore and he mentions that he didn't actually let her blow him so good job. So yeah, she kisses Eric and they're kind of a thing now. And then it recaps the entire story. It recaps literally everything that has happened over the course of several pages. And keep in mind this isn't a long book. We're like 200 pages in at this point and it decides, yeah let's recap every little thing that's happened. And that does not end here. Throughout this entire series around, I'm not exaggerating, around 7-10% of it is just recapping stuff that's already happened.  I don't want to repeat myself too much, but just keep in mind as I'm going through this, one, we're getting a bunch of recaps throughout. And two, we're getting tons of really really terrible lines throughout, which I'm not bringing up that much, but just know that the prose is terrible. The descriptions are occasionally passable when it's describing what people look like and the way their eyes shine and that sort of thing.  It's terrible. So just know that throughout this whole thing. After this we learn that apparently Aphrodite gets visions of the future. Like she'll just randomly stop and see something, and yeah, it's something bad that'll happen usually. But she never tells anybody for some reason, I don't know. And apparently at some point in the past, she saw a vision of a plane crashing and didn't tell anybody, and one of Zoe's new friends overheard her talking about it, and she had to go to Neferet and the leaders of the school in order to tell them about it, and then they were able to stop the plane crash.  Like I get the feeling the author didn't realize that Aphrodite was being a sociopath when she did that. So anyways, Zoe continues to change fast, and apparently she has a connection to all five of the big elements which has never ever been seen before. And so she's just super powerful without having to work for it, which makes her a really compelling protagonist, thanks. And then her grandmother tells her with great power comes great responsibility because might as well rip off Spider-Man at this point. So when we found out that sometimes vampire fledglings just die without changing because the body rejects it, the one guy that we see die is named Elliot, and apparently he was the one whose blood they drank at that weird ritual party with Aphrodite when it was mixed with wine. And so Zoe joins the Dark Daughters to quote, take down Aphrodite and yeah, whatever. And Aphrodite tries to attack her at one point. She's saying like, you'll never take over blah blah blah and she tries to punch her. And Zoe says that time slows down and she catches her wrist, but I don't know if they meant that literally, or like she's using magic to actually slow time so she can react faster, her body has changed enough so her reflexes are faster. I don't know, whatever. So apparently when she drank blood from her old human boyfriend Heath, they became imprinted on each other, which is basically just a bond between humans and vampires where there's telepathic, I'll link there.  You are with me. I love you. You can't just walk away. And then Zoe sees Elliot's ghost, at least she thinks it's his ghost wandering around and she's like, whoa, that's weird. And then, okay, so when Zoe is, in order to take down Aphrodite and join the Dark Daughters and become their new leader, Zoe does this weird ritual circle with her. And I want you to keep this in mind, like ritual circles are basically where there's one person for each element and then they put their powers together and do stuff. And none of it is particularly exciting but at the same time they can do anything they want seemingly with a ritual circle because every problem in the series is solved with that. You'll see what I mean as I go ahead. But basically she summons some like old spirits and then Heath comes, climbs over the school's wall, gets attacked by the spirits and almost dies but Zoe takes over the circle and vanishes them. And then Aphrodite kind of whines about it a little bit and Zoe tells her off because she's just that cool and then she gets made leader by Neferet because again she's just that cool. And then Neferet erases Heath's memory of the events because apparently if he stays away from Zoe, like their imprint hasn't fully manifested so if he stays away from her long enough then it'll just fade away or break so he wants to erase his memory and keep him away. And Zoe's mark has become fancier and because again, Ebony Darkness, Dementia Ravenway has to have cool tattoos and everyone loves Zoe all of a sudden. And okay so Neferet in this case just making this student who has been here for like a week the leader of the Dark Daughters is it's reminiscent of that scene at the end of the first Harry Potter book where Dumbledore just gives Gryffindor the house cup and I mean at least Harry and them did things to earn that. Like you know obviously Dumbledore is showing some pretty clear bias there I get that but at least they did stuff to deserve their praise and everything. Is Zoe really didn't? Really this story at the end of the day it makes promises it can't keep like it's supposedly a story about how vampires are cool and about how magic is cool and all that I don't know but it's really just high school drama throughout it all and if you wanted to do that you could have just removed vampires from it and made it a regular high school drama thing. Now I just want to mention real quick that I have read the first book in the Vampire Academy series which I read it like six years ago and that book had kind of the same problem but that one was only like 70 to 80% high school drama stuff and the last 20 to 30% was like an actual story you know there was an actual villain and he was doing bad things and one of the main characters had this special power to be driving her insane and all that but this doesn't even have that okay I know it gets it later on but Jesus. So that's the end of book one. Book two, Betrayal. This one starts with some sort of open house where the human parents of the vampires come in to see like what the school is like and all that and apparently Damien is acting gayer than he usually does which is weird and then Zoe's mom and step-dad show up her siblings don't show up they're never brought up again I don't think or they might have been once or twice more I don't know but they show up and they look around and her step-fathers like God vampires are so stupid and her mom is kind of just going along with him and Zoe talks about again how her mom is only with this dude because he has money they live in a quote, gy-hugic house so yeah she combined the words huge and gigantic into one really stupid word and normally I wouldn't bring that up but they use it a total of eight other times throughout the series and I counted they use it eight other times throughout the series and well that's not a huge number it's eight too many so while her step-dad is going around talking about how stupid vampires are and how evil they are blah blah blah this scene it's very unearned but I guess it could have been worse because she basically tells him hey I wouldn't come into your church and talk shit about Jesus or whatever so don't come into mine and talk shit about my goddess but he can't handle it so he's like fine I'll leave and then he leaves with Zoe's mom as well which again it's like it's unearned emotion this could have been a moment where Zoe really feels like oh god my mom doesn't care about me it doesn't work and also apparently throughout all of this apparently as soon as students are inducted into the house of night they become legally emancipated so it's not like her parents can force her to leave or anything feel like they should have to do some paperwork before that but whatever so and while this is happening Aphrodite's parents are also there and her parents are super wealthy and loaded her dad is actually the mayor of Tulsa they literally just give her an evil plan and Zoe overhears it they tell her you need to disgrace that girl so that you can become the leader of the dark daughters again because if you're not then you're not cool anymore they literally just give her an evil plan oh my god so Zoe is reforming the dark daughters she wants to make it so that a couple of them are chosen and a bunch of them are elected and she wants to make it I don't know what they're supposed to do but she wants to make it more than just a social club for a tiny little niche of people and she explains this all to one of the professors at the school whose name is Lauren who is a poet apparently and he voraciously flirts with her and gives her this dirty poem that he heard and um I really hated this part let me tell you Lauren is this dude in his 20s Zoe is 16 and she is a student at a school where he works there is no situation in which this is acceptable behavior on his part and it wouldn't bother me nearly as much if there weren't so many shitty young adult stories that had this exact sort of plot point where this teenage girl is in some sort of relationship with a teacher of hers that's in his 20s like Vampire Academy did it, this one did it Divergent did it, Pretty Little Liars did it and The Throne of Glass kinda did it I mean in that one Selena was 19 or 20 so it wasn't as bad but Rowan was still her teacher in a position of authority over her and he was still much much older so it's still kinda creepy but anyways yeah Zoe is like wow that dude is really cute and she's around dating Eric so she kiss kisses Eric one of her old schoolmates her old human schoolmates goes missing and Zoe just immediately assumes that he's dead okay that's whatever and then Zoe goes and has dinner with Nepharet and they have like long conversation about stuff and Nepharet also agrees that schoolmate is dead again with no evidence whatsoever like they turn out to be correct but like you should investigate before you come to conclusions like that guys and apparently Aphrodite has lost her future sight powers or at least Nepharet thinks she has cause Nick no longer likes Aphrodite it's not whatever and she talks about how impressed she is with Zoe for no reason but the important part is that um Eric and Heath and Zoe are now in a love triangle yeah you could that was like the one good thing about the first book is that they didn't feel the need to throw one of those in there like Heath was kinda coming after Zoe but she was not interested in him at all and Aphrodite was kinda coming after Eric but he wasn't interested in her at all um yeah yeah there's a love triangle now and anyways not long afterwards they find Zoe's body of Zoe's schoolmate so he really was dead and then another guy goes missing and then Aphrodite has a vision of Zoe's grandmother dying um in a car crash and she basically forces Zoe to whatever eventually she tells Zoe about it and they find out that there's a bridge that's gonna collapse and they're like well I can't tell everyone that Aphrodite had a vision otherwise she'll be mad at us and she won't tell us anymore visions so the solution they come up with to get the bridge closed is they call it a fake bomb threat and um wouldn't it have been easier to just get in trouble with one of your schoolmates also I just want to point out that when they call in the bomb threat they pretend to be a fake terrorist group in nature's jihad so make of that what you will and um anyways they recap a bunch of stuff I shouldn't bring that up cause you should just assume they recap stuff and um she talks to the police and the police are like hey we think you killed people but she was in school so they're like oh okay she's innocent and not long after this we learn that vampire fledglings apparently have to stay near full vampires they die um what like if vampire fledglings are not around full vampires for more than a couple of hours at a time then or a couple of days at a time then they just die and their bodies reject the change um if that's the case how are vampires around at all because wouldn't the first person who changed into a vampire not have been around any other full vampires and then just died so then the next person wouldn't have any full vampires to be around then they just die wouldn't people just start randomly dying so uh Zoe just goes out to shop and then she meets Heath at the store and um he kind of flirts with her but she's like no we can't be doing that anymore and then um oh yeah also I guess Lauren could be included in here so really it's a love trying or love rectangle not triangle um and then he follows her to her car and gets in with her which is fellas that's not a good way to get to a girl's heart just just throwing that out there um and at first you're thinking oh okay he's gonna like assault her or something well that's stupid she's a vampire she could kick his ass and then I realized well could she cause I mean at this point we haven't really learned about anything vampires can do with their powers like other than you know form a circle and summon spirits and stuff but that's not that interesting like vampires are they super fast or strong like we don't know at this point can they like summon fireballs and throw them at people we don't know at this point um but yeah he um brings out a razor blade and he's like hey you should drink more of my blood because it's super pleasurable for both sides when they do that and he cuts himself and lets her drink you would think he would cut himself on his arm or something no he fucking takes a razor blade cuts the side of his neck really deep I'm like dude you could kill yourself doing that jeez just stop being stop being stupid okay now at this point Zoe is basically involved with three dudes at once and she's still constantly referring to other girls as sluts and hoes which you know that's another really nice way to treat your main character just have her be a massive hypocrite um she more recaps while she's thinking of cute boys um although at this point she's preparing to do a magic ritual on the full moon and she's actually practicing for it you know she's practicing magic and everything it happens off screen but you know we um it's something you know it's better than her just knowing how to do it right away like she does with most stuff and then uh it's December at this point so Tulsa gets some snow and everyone's like enchanted by it wow that's so crazy we never get snow around here but I that sounded weird to me Tulsa gets 9 inches of snow a year and that's not a lot but still they shouldn't be like enchanted by it so Neferet is seen sneaking around by Zoe and then she speaks to Elliott's ghost or whatever it is and Zoe's like what that's crazy she sees him too I wasn't just seeing things and then he like goes in this trap door that's hidden somewhere on the campus and then leaves and then whatever whatever so then um because she drank Heath's blood their imprint is now stronger and when she thinks about him she can actually see him and she sees him masturbating at one point because he also senses her there and yeah whatever and then um Eric does a monologue cause he's an actor and they all watch it and um Zoe's friend Stevie Ray says quote that was so romantic I almost peed my pants who the fuck wrote this so they do the ritual um Zoe's friends are given elemental affinities so they all have one for like earth or fire or whatever and Neferet takes credit for Zoe's idea to reform the dark daughters and Zoe's kind of upset about that and the ritual takes a long time um and then Zoe's friend Stevie Ray dies her body rejects the change and she dies and it's supposed to be sad but Zoe's only known her for a month and she refers to her as her best friend um whatever and then um so Zoe has a vision of Heath where more of the ghost zombie things like Elliot and them uh take Heath into the trap door and drag him away and um then the cops come back later and they're like hey Heath is missing what's going on well the fact is I did murder someone last night I turned into a vampire it's a long story and apparently it's forbidden for humans to date vampires uh which is blatantly contradicted later and then uh Zoe thinks about how nice Heath is and gets horny over him and one of the police while she's talking to him I should mention talks about how his sister is a vampire and he's like hey I still love her and Zoe thinks that's weird and I'm like is it really weird you know I'd like to think that if my sister became a wizard who just didn't like to go out during the day time but other than that her personality remained unchanged I'd like to think I'd still love her so Zoe talks to Heath telepathically um the zombies drink some of his blood and uh she notices that one of them appears to be Stevie Ray like her ghost or zombie or whatever and then uh Zoe goes off to rescue him alone and she rides a horse there because of course she knows how to ride a horse and she manages to cast a spell which like keeps the snow away from her and also manages to cast one that makes her in the horse invisible because she's cool uh and then she manages to get down into the tunnels and she rescues Heath and the other uh zombie ghost things including Stevie Ray and Elliot are just uh the vampire fledglings who died except they didn't actually die they sort of came back and now they're like more like traditional vampires um where like the sunlight actually will burn them to death if they're um if they're not careful and they need to drink human blood a lot in order to not die we're never really given an explanation as to why these vampires turned like this like at first it seems like oh nephorites up to something but we're never given a proper explanation um temper your expectations accordingly um but anyways while Zoe is down there she actually manages to use magic in an interesting way like she shoots some fireballs and stuff and is like hey that's kind of cool I wish they did that one and a half books ago but whatever um and so Stevie Ray is there she's kind of alive and she begs Zoe for death I'm a vampire kill me kill me but Zoe doesn't do it and then Zoe runs brings Heath back and nephorette uh tries to delete her memory but apparently Zoe is just so special that it doesn't work and a book two there are ten more so book three chosen um Zoe's birthday comes up and it's apparently on Christmas Eve so they just talk a lot about um Christmas and her birthday and about um celebrating and all that Zoe's mom is offended and her stepdad calls her evil and they send her birthday card with Jesus being crucified on it um yeah all right cool and then Zoe goes out to see Stevie Ray again and she sees her eating a homeless person or not really eating but like sucking the blood from a homeless person and Zoe's kind of grossed out but she's not like shocked or horrified by this which is weird like again I'd like to think that if I saw my sister murdering a homeless person I would feel something about it other than that's kind of gross but whatever she convinces her to meet with uh clothes um by you know by offering her clean clothes because she's been hiding in tunnels forever so she's all dirty and stuff so Zoe and Eric are like making out and stuff she drinks some of his blood she gets horny and Lauren the teacher sees her and then um Lauren tells her okay they flirt a bunch more they flirt a bunch more he tells her it's okay to date and they kiss and Zoe talks about how he makes her feel so much more mature than the boys her age do gross and he tries to have sex with her and Zoe's like and no I shouldn't and she's like I think I'm turning into a hoe exact quote by the way and again it's like you're dating three guys at once you're a hoe honey stop being hypocritical either embrace it and enjoy it or stop doing it so um after they died they needed a person to replace her in their circle so they joined Aphrodite um or so they let Aphrodite join and Eric is super upset about that Zoe ignores his feelings because she's a terrible person Aphrodite finds out about Stevie Ray still being kind of alive and so she offers up her family's like second home as a place where they can meet her and so um Zoe and Aphrodite meet Stevie Ray there and they managed to get some like human blood for her and some nice clothes and everything so she can wash up and they hide her out there and at one point Stevie Ray complains about the blood being cold and they just tell her to microwave it I've never microwaved blood before but I don't think that would work very well one of the professors is uh killed in fact it's the professor of like magic and everything that Zoe was gonna go to to see if she could find a way to save Stevie Ray and she's actually mutilated like her head is cut off and she's crucified uh on campus and they leave a note there which is uh Exodus 2218 uh which is thou shalt not suffer a witch to live which fun facts by the way uh when looking at the bible or any historical document really you have to take into consideration the context in which it was written and in greek the word for witch is also the same as female poisoner so you have to wonder people living out in the desert what would they be more worried about would they be worried about the woman who lives on the edge of town and mixes up herbs that help with your headaches or would they be worried about someone poisoning their only source of water so just you know the bible doesn't actually hate witches that much it's just kind of an interesting fact but you know anyways uh they bring in a bunch of vampire warriors who I guess they're useful I don't know like they use swords and shit so like I feel like I could take them all out with a gun but you know whatever so what anyways the professor is killed and they assume humans did it knowing that there's all this danger zoe decides to go out and go see heath again uh she thinks about boys she drinks some of his blood and then these uh two black guys show up and harass them and I mentioned that they're black guys because the book really goes out of its way to let us know that they're black like it talks about how their genes are sagging and they're talking about how hey white girl that white boy can't do that for you whatever um and then she hits them with a blast of wind which sends them in front of a truck and they get hit by and um I think they're killed but we never really we never get a confirmation of that so Eric um completes his transformation into a full vampire because I guess that that's just how it happens now zoe is kind of upset about this and for whatever reason and then she goes to Lauren and then they have sex again gross and uh by doing this uh or when doing this she drinks his blood which imprints on him and breaks the blonde with heath which is very painful for both of them and then um Eric sees them right after they have sex um and then he breaks up with zoe which is fair so then zoe is upset by this and then she goes off and over here is Lauren talking with nephorette and apparently nephorette told him specifically to seduce zoe so that it would make her friends angry at her and isolate her more then zoe tells all her friends about stevie ray still being alive they try to learn things to help her and they manage to heal her through the power of friendship and by just being that special I guess um but when they make the circle uh stevie ray drinks some of aphrodite's blood and afterwards her mark disappears and they're like wait is she no longer a vampire and she runs off and then um Lauren shows up dead mutilated the same way the other professor was and it's clear nephorette killed him and then she declares war on humans end of book 3 book 4 untamed aphrodite shows up she's human now we get a recap um other more important vampires the nephorette show up like the leaders of the high council of vampires and all that they show up and uh they put down the shield that she put up to prevent people from coming or going without her knowing uh so that whole thing was pointless and they tell her you can't declare war on humans aphrodite has visions of zoe's death if she lives there's no war um they summon nix and nix tells them vague things she's not helpful at all uh they meet with the high priestess who I'm not even gonna name because she's not important she mentions that she doesn't want a war and because the last time that happened we had the Salem burnings of vampires which again vampires are just witches in this whatever so he's angry at zoe again totally reasonable because like she broke their bond which was super painful for him and she didn't contact him afterwards so he specifically says he thought she was dead and he had no way of knowing so yeah that's a shitty thing to do and then um Eric is now the professor of acting at their school or whatever and uh she does Shakespearean improv with him which I have never heard of that um it and I mean I'm not like a super big actor or anything but like I did do theater in high school so whatever whatever I I've just never heard of that and then um it's a scene from a fellow and then they kiss and he chokes her which consent if it's consensual it's fine but like the fact that it's not as weird and do I have enough battery power to even keep doing this yeah I got I got time I got time so um yeah he doesn't forgive her but they're on the road to forgiveness now so Aphrodite despite being a human still has visions and so she has vision a vision of zoe's grandmother again doing things and she's like holding a poem and apparently um the poem mentions that there are like evil spirits and angels and stuff and okay so after a little while while discussing this and everything they discovered that the poem they saw was a prophecy so they saw a vision of the future and in that vision of the future there was a prophecy which they used to discover what's going to happen in the future why not just use the prophecy on its own like okay we find out later that there is actually a character who writes poetry and her poetry is um like it predicts the future and she's not that important so I'm not gonna really bring her up again but we find out that she predicts the future through poetry why not just find one of her poems in the regular world or better yet just have Aphrodite like say something say a prophecy like the oracle in uh like Percy Jackson for example that's a good series that deals with prophecy well because for the most part I don't like visions of the future in stories there they don't work that well but uh Percy Jackson it works well because Rick Riordan or Reordan I'm still not sure how to say his name I'm sorry but he understood how uh ancient Greek tragedies used them and so in the first book for example uh he's told that Percy's told that he'll go west and face the god who is turned and that he'll be betrayed by the one who calls him a friend and so throughout the whole book you're assuming that the god who is turned is Hades because they think Hades stole Zeus's master bolt but it turns out Ares actually stole it so they're like oh ok so the prophecy was right we just interpreted it wrong and throughout the whole book you're thinking either Grover or Annabeth is gonna somehow betray him but then it turns out to be another one of his friends named Luke he's the one that betrays him and so again the prophecy was right we just interpreted it wrong and so it works really well there in this the visions and prophecies half the time they'd never lead anywhere and in this case it's just brought about so clumsily like my god I'm not gonna go into this whole long back story but basically there was this sort of fallen angel or god character named Kelowna who lived uh among the Cherokee for a while and as a god he raped a whole bunch of women and the children of their offspring became these raven demon things that are part raven part demon and um they discover like ok we think Nepharet's gonna try and bring Kelowna back cause he was imprisoned in the earth a long time ago and uh Zoe is attacked by one of these demons and is protected so she's like oh shit that's crazy um she argues with Eric and she talks about how we need to forgive each other no you don't uh Eric needs to forgive you like ok cheating on someone is obviously a big deal in a relationship and it's different for everybody like if uh Eric decides that he can go past that and continue with Zoe then he can do that and maybe their relationship will be stronger because of it but if he decides he can't well then he can't like there's nothing he did wrong here at all like not even in the smaller bits that he skipped over he's just a dude who got screwed over yeah so Zoe's a bitch and I hate her so Zoe's grandma gets in a car crash uh because a demon crashes into her windshield and she goes into a coma and that's it for her for a while and what they plan to do is do a ritual and then they're gonna have Stevie Ray come out and take a place in the circle and everyone's gonna be like what Stevie Ray you're alive and um apparently uh so what they call her the fledglings that died and then come back they referred to them as red fledglings or red vampires like Stevie Ray I think is a full red vampire and like I said they're like traditional vampires where the sun will actually burn them and they need to drink blood more often um and they're just gonna announce at the ritual to everybody hey these are real so that people know and so they plan for another ritual because they don't do anything else so at the beginning of this book um the love rectangle turns into a love pentagon because this new guy named Stark enters the picture and he's like just an older vampire fledgling who Zoe sees and thinks is super cute and um he just gives her they have this um brief meeting where Zoe says like she feels a connection with him and she thinks he might be her soulmate and all that talking about fairy tale love talking about a mature relationship and he gives her his whole tragic backstory about how he has uncontrollable powers and accidentally killed his mentor and all that and then he dies um because his body rejects the change and she's sad but she thinks he might come back and during the ritual where Stevie Ray and them are he comes back and Nefret blames Zoe for it she's like oh he's supposed to be dead you're doing evil magic and um yeah cool whatever so Nefret sort of takes over the circle and summons the demons and releases Kelowna and um they go out and start you know attacking the city and they mention that there are fires and they can hear gunshots and stuff and I'm making that sound kind of exciting because you're thinking oh wow the world's actually getting destroyed it's not don't worry um they decide like Zoe and some of her friends decide uh we need to run off into the tunnels because we'll be safe down there with the rest of the red fledglings and Zoe specifically says at one point that um I wasn't sure how we survived it must have been because Nix liked us or that's not verbatim but she basically says we survived because Nix like that's a very unsatisfying way to end your action scene but whatever and uh so yeah while she's down there she calls her heath and she calls her mom and she tells them hey demons are out there wrecking shit where we need to you need to run that's basic that's the gist of it and then so they're down there and they're like okay we need to make a plan so we can go kill bad guys end of book four we're only a third of the way through this and they have only just recently brought up who the main antagonist is supposed to be so book five hunted we start with a dream which is the best way to start off your story with something that has no stakes and is just there for clunky exposition so um apparently Kelowna is there and he talks to Zoe a little bit he wants her as a wife and she's horny for him because this love pentagon needs to become a love hexagon and um okay so he refers to her as Aya which is the name of this artificial girl made of clay and enchanted that the Cherokee made in order to trap him in the earth and so he thinks that she's the reincarnation of her and it's confirmed later that she is because I guess reincarnation works in this world or exists in this world whatever I don't care anymore we get recap Stevie Ray got shot with an arrow during the battle at the end there it was fired by Stark by the way I don't think you care and they managed to save her life and heal the wound and they're hiding in the tunnels and apparently at some point because Stevie Ray drank Aphrodite's blood they're imprinted now alright and the red vampires are mad at Zoe because they killed one of them alright I'm gonna skip over a bunch of stuff because like a third of this book is just them in the tunnels in like three different rooms so it's people arguing whatever and apparently all the demon destruction everything above ground settled down after a while and so the human news stations report that it was like some sort of gang activity and it's just like what what the fuck like I'm not saying there's no gangs in Tulsa I'm sure there are but like are there any that could destroy like half the city I'm really asking so remember how fledglings need to be near full vampires or they'll die well Zoe gets cut by a demon and her wound is pretty bad and they managed to stabilize it but like she used up a bunch of her spirit energy or whatever healing and so she's gonna die if she's not around more full vampires and even though there's one with them that's not enough so there's like okay we're gonna have to go back to the house of night and so they go back and Kelowna and Neff are running things and they're being super authoritarian about it and the demon ravens are around watching everything that people do and so the cliffhanger ending of the last book changed basically nothing whatever and so Zoe heals and Kelowna wants to make Zoe evil so that she'll be his wife properly and Zoe is surprised that he's evil because after hearing a story where he's literally rape dozens or hundreds of women she thinks he might just be misunderstood or whatever Zoe does some more magic stuff and it's mentioned that she gets tired when she does it which is the first point in this entire series where there's any sort of cost for magic so you know point in this book's favorite I guess they see Stark who is now he's like a red vampire thing like but he's under the control of Kelowna sort of and she sees him try to rape a girl but she still loves him I guess and um yeah whatever so we discover that the Neferet and Kelowna's plan is to because they actually killed the high priestess of all the vampires at the end of the last book during the ritual so their plan is to call an election and bring them all together and then they're going to proclaim that Neferet is the avatar of Nyx on this world and that Kelowna is a arabist or who is the consort of Neferet you know he's her husband and then they're gonna get her to elect Neferet the leader of all the vampires like the queen of the damned or whatever I'm sorry I'm moving around so much but my leg muscles are cramping up like I said I only slept like 3 hours last night and I stayed awake until 6 am finishing this so you know it's um yeah whatever so basically Zoe um sleeps with Stark but when I say sleeps with him I mean they don't have sex but like they sleep in the same bed for it's not important why and then he swears an oath to her which apparently breaks his connection to Kelowna and then he becomes like a full red vampire and he's like wow I'm a good guy now because that's how being good and evil works you know and um they mention killing Neferet in order to help things and Zoe decides no I don't want to kill Neferet because even though she's killed a bunch of people and stuff this is why all the fantasy adventure stuff such as it is in the story it doesn't fit with all the high school drama and romance stuff we have this character Zoe who might have been fine in high school drama soap opera whatever you want to call it and you know she might have been a good character or a bad one but she would have worked okay in that story but in this one where she's supposed to be like trying to save the world and stuff and she's just straight up saying no I don't want to kill Neferet and there's no real reason for it other than she doesn't want to you know it's not that she doesn't want to kill anybody because she killed one of the uh kids in the tunnels and at other points she kills a couple of people it's just no I don't want to kill Neferet and there's no real reason for it it just it doesn't work anyways they set a fire at the house of night to distract people and then they escape to a church which is apparently built on a spot that has a bunch of power in it and then her grandmother is alive and comes there and then they do another circle ritual because that's that's how all these books end I swear they do the ritual really good and then they banish Neferet and Kelowna and imprison them back in the earth and you might be thinking well that sounds fine you know that's a shitty ending to a shitty series but like it's an ending there's seven books left guys book six tempted so this is the first one where we have multiple POVs like the majority of it is still told from Zoe's first person perspective but we um get some third person following other characters around and that's even worse than just having multiple characters in first person because and even then I don't like multiple characters in first person very much the only time I've seen that work pretty well was in the young world because that series well it did have some pretty serious issues all of the POV characters had very distinct voices and it worked really really well to show off their personalities whereas in this it switches between Zoe's narration which doesn't have a whole lot of personality and the third person narration which doesn't have a whole lot of personality and it just creates this weird dichotomy where you're like well how does how is she telling her story like you're not supposed to think about that too much like you might be thinking okay there's a chip in their head recording everything or you might be thinking okay this is a journal that they wrote down afterwards but when it switches between that and third person it just feels weird there are creepy tunnels and they think like Kelona's still around and they're thinking like yeah he's still gonna break out at some point and the demons are still wandering around so we gotta you know prepare which is fine at one point they mentioned that they're watching the sound of music which makes me wonder were there a vampire Nazis or were there be Nazi vampires I don't know I I mean there were Nazi vampires in Helsing and in Blood Rain so but those are much cooler than this so I don't know just the thought I had so anyways Stevie Ray finds one of the demons with a broken wing and she can't bring herself to kill him so she hides him away and helps him heal and because whatever and it's very clear at this point that there's gonna be a romance there because there's no other relationship for characters to have so Zoe and Eric break up for real for real this time because she cheats on him and she's like still super into Stark at this point and I'm not really spoiling anything by saying that Stark is like the one that she winds up choosing out of this love hexagon or hell you could say heptagon if you want to count Kelona in there that's you know whatever so Aphrodite has a vision of Zoe killing Kelona but then she also has a vision of her ruling by his side and being evil Zoe helps heal some people the other crazy red fledglings are choosing to side with Kelona and Nefarat because they're just evil they don't want to side with the good guys and they kind of attack Ski-B-Ray and they kind of attack um the demon I don't know I didn't write it down because I didn't think it would be important and then after a while I just decided it wasn't and it's not actually it's not I might cut that part out who knows so they're thinking that Kelona's still around and so so according to Aphrodite his visions using some clues from that they discovered that Kelona is in Italy which okay that's fine but then they check Twitter and apparently it's confirmed that yeah him and Nefarat are in Italy and I'm like what what like okay first off how did you escape your prison and second off how did you why not just have them mention it on Twitter or on the news or something and the visions if you're yeah okay and we find out like the one little interesting bit of information in this whole series like the one little interesting bit of lore is that Kelona used to be Nix's oath sworn warrior um but then his heart got broken because she didn't love him properly and so she cast him down to Earth and so you know fallen angel imagery and all that which is not super cool but whatever so the evil red fledglings or red vampires whatever try to kill skiviray by locking her in this area where the sun will hit her and she's there with Raphim the demon and he sort of shields her from the sun he's like hey come on get us out of here with his wings you know that must have looked stupid if you didn't know what I was doing whatever he heals her or not heals her hey she shields her and then they wind up imprinting because yeah cool and then that breaks her imprint with aphrodite because you know that didn't go anywhere so we might as well get rid of it and then zoe back in Italy sees the vampire council and then she tells everybody hey Nepharet and Kelona are evil we can't be doing this and they're like hmm that's uh that's interesting we'll consider saying and then um she goes off and sees or excuse me uh Kelona and Nepharet are often this meadow doing something and heath sees them and he's like hey they're up to something bad and they tries to tell zoe hey something bad's happening and then um that she goes and runs to get him and then Kelona kills heath and zoe in her uh grief I guess throws her spirit at Kelona but it shatters and so her body she's not dead but her spirit goes to the other world and her body is just basically comatose on the earth like it's in a vegetative state and this might have worked okay but they've never brought up like the other world or anything like that before um so you know there's that and that's the end of book 6 so book 7 burned these titles are really stupid god I just got okay um so apparently there's a vampire queen and nothing was like that was not mentioned before so whatever oh yeah I should also mention that um book 7 onwards I read these all in the last 24 hours to just give you an idea of the craziness I'm dealing with right now so apparently there's a vampire queen um they bring Zoe's body to the queen's isle um and they're able to do that because apparently Stark is uh related to the queen's guardian so uh he goes on like this spirit quest basically and he kills his evil self and becomes a shaman and then he's able to go to the other world um again none of this was brought up before so it just kind of comes out of nowhere and honestly killing your evil self in a vision is like the dumbest cheesiest thing you could possibly throw in a story like this but you know it happens and then uh in the other world he basically he fades away and at first I was thinking oh okay he's dead for real like his spirit passed on to whatever the beyond is um but don't worry we'll deal with that later and then um Stark fights Kelowna in an arena in the other world because I don't know why Kelowna would bother fighting fair um and then he dies and then Kelowna decides to share his immortality with Stark to bring him back to life I know this sounds like I'm doing it really fast but the book does it really fast too and uh by sharing his immortality with him Kelowna is no longer immortal and apparently he was like we I was thinking Neferet was his subordinate but no he's Neferet's bitch like he swore an oath to her at some point but by sharing his immortality the terms of the oath are broken so Neferet just banishes all of them yeah so also um while all this is going on Stevie Ray back in Oklahoma is doing her thing and um shhh man she invokes this um white bull by mistake and apparently in this world there's the darkness and the light and the darkness is represented by the white bull and the light is represented by the black bull because light isn't always good and dark isn't always bad because this series is hashtag deep and um anyways um Stevie Ray accidentally invokes the evil white bull and winds up being helped by the black bull which is light I don't know they talk about how the red vampires have to accept either the dark or the light because again hashtag deep and Stevie Ray is now like officially in love with the demon Raphame um but uh he senses that his father is back in our world and he's like I'm sorry but I need to go to my father and basically that's the end of book seven book eight awakened oh my god this is still going so Zoe and Stark fuck under a tree because I don't know who got the idea that having sex under a tree is romantic but I've seen it a lot and not in real life but like in shit like this I've seen a lot and I'm like have any of you had sex under a tree before so was it any good I don't know but so after going to the other world and everything Zoe can now use uh the old Faye magic which again never mentioned before nothing in this book is in these books is ever mentioned before it becomes necessary to the story and quite frankly I don't think the authors knew where they were going with this uh at all like okay so not having the whole thing planned out from book one is acceptable like you know you're going to run into some issues with it a lot the game uh a song of ice and fire by George Jebelar Martin but like it's an acceptable way to work this one I feel like they didn't know what they were doing from page to page and they never bothered editing and actually several of these books were released two in one year so you know just keep that in mind as as reading this like this might be why it's such a mess so anyways uh Zoe because she can use old Faye magic the vampire queen talks to her and she's like you know you're so special and cool I want you to be the next queen after I die because she's just so special uh and then they can sense the darkness coming back in Oklahoma so Zoe goes back to Oklahoma and um Kelowna can enter Stark's mind uh because he you know he gave him part of his immortality so they're connected now um I don't know how a god was bound by an oath to Nefret in the first place but like maybe he's not a god so much as he is just a really powerful being kind of like in uh god of war you know where they're just I don't know that this series does not give nearly enough info to have any sort of fan theories at all and so when they get there Nefret is there and she's like still the in charge of the house of night and she publicly apologizes for everything and she's like hey I'm sorry I'm evil but I won't do it again and Zoe knows it's a lie but she goes along with it so that she can bide her time which like okay I get how Zoe would would do that that makes sense but like why would the others go along if Nefret is just if she's just evil and they've seen evidence of it why would they go along with it like um yeah okay so Nefret um sticks some guards on them they fight with a circle obviously so the the demon refrain Stevie Ray's raven boyfriend um comes along and fights during all this and he decides you know what I'm gonna fight with my friends and not be evil uh and so Nyx decides to um put like a curse I don't know if a curse would be the right word but she puts something on him so that uh in order to punish him for his crimes he is a raven during the day uh but then at night he becomes a human so like I guess that's a punishment sure but like it doesn't sound that bad all that really yeah and so Zoe and company start a new house of night in the tunnels uh yeah okay whatever but the um the really the really crazy thing that happens at the end of this book is um okay okay so Nefret gets Zoe's mom who has not been around for a while but you know apparently she left her stepdad too which is alright uh and she kills Zoe's mom and then she summons Heath's spirit from the beyond and I know what you're thinking I know what you're thinking did Nefret put Heath's soul Zoe's ex-boyfriend's soul into her mom's body sort of unfortunately he doesn't come back just as her mom he comes back in a sort of different body uh and we'll get more into that later but his name is Orox which is spelled with an X because it's cooler I guess whatever that's how book eight ends book nine destined we're getting there we're getting there um so Heath like I said is now Orox and he kind of knows he's Heath but kind of doesn't and um Nefret wants to use him in order to kill darkness remember the white bull because it's deep uh and become a goddess yeah okay and then uh Orox uh fights a demon and while he's fighting he half shifts into a bull because he's a werebull now get it cause Orox I couldn't figure it out from the name and he's basically just a bad boy you know because they needed to add another love interest for Zoe and they're you know talking about stuff and she's like oh my mom's dead I'm sad and Orox is nice to her um Jesus Christ so Kelona decides to call a truce between everybody even though there already kind of was a truce cause you know they just kind of set up their own house at night and whatever and then they get a prophecy of Refim's death demon boys death and um they you know they do this whole ritual again ritual circles for he's fucking everything in this series and it reveals how Zoe's mom died and now they have like definitive proof that Neferet's evil even though they kind of already had proof that Neferet's evil whatever and then the new priestess that showed them all this kind of chases Neferet away and she runs off shaking her fist I'll get you one day and her name is Thanatos by the way the new priestess and she becomes the new leader of this house at night and Kelona pledges to her and end of book 9 book 10 hidden this one is probably the most pointless and don't get me wrong there's a lot of filler in this series like people breaking up and getting back together and then dying and then coming back to life and people who minor characters we don't care about and their romantic exploits and all that like there's a lot of filler in this series but book 10 is the most pointless like Kelona really is good now Zoe's grandma gets kidnapped and then they save her and the vampire council when they exile Neferet officially she turns into a whole mess of spiders and runs away I didn't know her powers could do that but you know that's not important and then they learn that Orox is heath or sort of heath end of book 10 book 11 revealed we're almost there so it starts with the house at night having an open house where they like invite the humans in and they do like you know they have booths set up like here's food and here's crafts and all that Neferet appears as a ghost she says some evil stuff they defeat her with a circle you know would it kill you to mix it up a little like really would it kill you to mix it up like we we know at least Zoe can shoot fireballs and do magic stuff why not just have the vampires do stuff like that once in a while I'm dying I'm no longer dying so Aphrodite's dad who remember is the mayor of Tulsa is killed and Aphrodite's mom is really upset about it and Aphrodite is really upset about it which is um honestly pretty reasonable like I'll talk a little bit more about this later but Aphrodite is the one character in this whole series that even though I didn't like her that much she has a little bit of personality to her or rather her and Zoe are the only ones that have a little bit of personality and a little bit of depth and a little bit of complexity so Aphrodite despite having a super complex relationship with her dad and not liking him all that much is still super upset when he dies and well that was that was something you know it was like three in the morning when I read that so before three in the morning but whatever it was late when I read that so whatever so Zoe um accidentally drinks some of Orox's blood remember Orox's heath as a wearable um and her powers are kind of going out of control and she accidentally kills two homeless people and um I just feel like this series hates homeless people at this point because you know Stevie Ray and the Red Vamps were killing homeless people for food for a while and then Zoe kills two homeless people but throughout all of this it's kind of like eh it's it's fine you know they're not evil anymore but like you still did evil shit like you should have to face some consequences for that I feel so Zoe turns herself into the police um and cool and while all of this is going on it keeps cutting to Neferet and as she's like you know preparing to become super powerful and all that we get her backstory it's not interesting so I don't know why they bother putting it in like it's not even like uh someone from throne of glass whose name I already forgot by the way but you know she was like actually a demon who was just pretending to be the fairy queen that was kind of interesting but this is not anyways it ends with Neferet massacring a church and coming into her full power which is okay cool I just don't care you know at least at least be crazy again you know at least do some more stuff where you put boyfriend's dead souls into mom's bodies and then whatever it's over book 12 redeemed we are in the home stretch so this is the last one that name redeemed is pretty I want it just gotta say Zoe's name is cleared um which is weird because she actually did kill the two homeless guys even if it's an accident that's still illegal but her grandmother cleanses her soul alright whatever and then Neferet takes over a hotel and enthralls the humans that are there so that they'll worship her like a goddess and um apparently only Zoe can defeat Neferet using the old fey magic alright so they cast another circle spell and it basically just makes a barrier around the hotel so Neferet is trapped in there and there's like 12 POVs throughout all of this which I think is trying to make it sound epic because it's supposed to be like this big fate of the world battle it all takes place in Tulsa, Oklahoma and there's really not that much fighting throughout so yeah the multiple POVs really aren't necessary and most of the characters when I got to their POV I seriously forgot who they were and I was just like yeah whatever they're doing things I just I just needed to get it done and I know I said I wouldn't be reading any more terrible lines because quite frankly I want you to be able to go through this series and find some for yourself at one point Aphrodite is like making out with her boyfriend because you know everybody needs to be paired off in some way in this series otherwise they're not a complete human and she says to Zoe quote seriously Z you've got to stop the whole coitus-interruptus thing it's getting on my nerves Stevie Ray is supposed to save the dumb lines in order to lure Kelona out Neferet starts throwing people off the balcony and when he sees that he goes in and flies in to save them and then she shoots him with magic bullets and he well he dies but he doesn't die right away he has this long prolonged death with his girlfriend Thanatos because I was so invested in their relationship and I totally care about Kelona who was the villain and got redeemed for really no reason and anyways Neferet manages to break the spell that's holding her prisoner and Orox dies fighting some demons again I don't care because he's already died once so Z and company defeat Neferet you'll never guess how they do it no really you will never ever ever guess did you guess that they beat her using a ritual circle well there's no prize yes they beat her using a ritual circle and then she's like banished slash killed slash I don't give a shit and everyone transforms into full vampires cool um that's yeah okay and then Zoe and all her friends become council members running this house of night even though there's like a whole bunch of houses of night out there so it's really not that impressive it's like if you defeated the president in a sword fight on top of the pentagon and then your reward for doing that was you got to be mayor of Pueblo, Colorado like that's that's not that impressive at that point but whatever and then in the epilogue we see that Orox's spirit which is really Heath's spirit I feel but he hasn't been Heath for like five books whatever his spirit ascends to the beyond and he gets to meet with Nix that is the end um what was this okay I mean I know this started as high school drama with a little bit of Harry Potter thrown in and it was a super big ripoff of Harry Potter with like not even doing not even doing the elements that made Harry Potter good well like it's just yeah there's magic and you're at school and there's houses but we're not gonna make any of that important I'm sorry my leg is really itchy right now but um it just went insane after a while and don't get me wrong some of that insanity is really funny but um it just went really off the rails if there even were any rails um but the main thing with this series that I have a problem with is that everything is solved too easy okay I know that like nothing is brought up until the exact moment it's needed to mention that a little bit but you really have no idea how often that happens it happens two or three times in every book and I I just wouldn't have time to mention all of it like I've been filming almost two hours already and I I didn't touch on anywhere near all the stuff I could have there's so much wrong with this series and you know everything being solved with just a circle which is basically just a glorified way of saying the power friendship it really is but everything being solved that same way is remarkably unsatisfying like remarkably you know if they had had the characters um fighting individually and they only use circles occasionally for special things uh like you know people were throwing fireballs and people were transforming into bowls and people were transforming into uh clouds of bats like that would be cool would be a cool thing to put in a fantasy adventure story and if you just wanted to write like high school romance and all that then whatever that's fine but don't throw in all of these these demons and all this rape and murder and stuff like god beyond the plot being absolute dog shit uh no characters have any personality other than they're good or they're bad and they love X because remember every character needs to be in a relationship except the bad guys once the bad guys get into a relationship that means they're no longer bad guys but no characters have any personality beyond that and um Zoe and Aphrodite were the exceptions because Zoe you know let's talk about Aphrodite first Aphrodite is interesting and she's complex you know she had these parents who were super wealthy but they raised her with ridiculous standards and they straight up tell her to do pretty nasty stuff and to the point where she becomes a basically a sociopath by the time she's a teenager but over the course of the story she realizes okay yeah I'm not I don't want to be a bad person anymore and she becomes better um and throughout all of this she still is kind of a bitch when she talks to people like you know she talks down to people she treats them as less than that sort of thing and it um she's not a likable character I should say that like she's interesting and has multiple facets to her but she's not likable on one hand that her unlikable unlikability makes her more interesting because it's kind of like she's saying yeah I'm a bitch like take it or leave it that's who I am so I guess some people might get something out of that but I didn't and Zoe is much much worse much worse okay she's special just because okay she's shallow okay she falls in love with dudes uh just because they're hot and they make her horny uh she's a total hypocrite she's constantly referring to other girls as sluts and hose while also being involved with multiple dudes at once and like again if you just want to be involved with multiple dudes at once like I'm not gonna stop you you live your life okay but just stop being such a hypocrite about it stop judging other people for it uh she has no goals at all throughout the story like it's just at the beginning of the story she's just a teenager what does she want to do with her life uh they mention she wants to be a veterinarian at a couple of points but that gets thrown out the window and it really has nothing to do with the story at large you know like if this had been a story about her wanting to become high priestess or something that that maybe could have worked but it uh it it it's not about that it's just oh there's bad guys let's go fight the bad guys so she has very little personality other than being a hypocritical bitch and she's just again total Mary Sue I hate using that because it's overused but that's the best word I can think of uh to describe her like this whole story is built around showing off how cool and how special Zoe is and she doesn't work for any of that so um yeah there's that um and the plot the plot goes all over the place but it never manages to escalate you know what I mean like the first uh two books let's say were basically just high school drama but then after that it's like oh okay people are dying and we need to save them which is um not particularly interesting but that's just the way they handle it is not particularly interesting and then they're like oh okay demon lord fallen angel god thing is gonna come back let's we gotta stop him and nephorette and pretty much every book ends with them setting the bad guys back like you know they they beat them just not permanently so it never manages to escalate the pros like I've mentioned at the beginning uh it's really bad you know the few little excerpts I gave you should have given you an idea and like it's funny but it's really bad and I feel like this book was trying to go for some sort of girl power fantasy but it uh it doesn't do that it doesn't do that at all like the vampires are matriarchal uh cool but they don't really do anything with that and they don't really show off how cool and special girls are um alright the technology and the cultural references are kind of all over the place because like I said the first book came out in 2007 and the last one was in 2014 and they take place over the course of only a couple of months though and so when they mention at the beginning that they're using like old school flip phones for cell phones that makes sense but then by the end they're using like smartphones and tablets and uh they're mentioning Game of Thrones and stuff like it's just it's just sloppy this series does not feel like it was edited at all it really doesn't and maybe that's just because uh the two authors PC Cast and Christian Cast uh PC Cast wrote it and Christian Cast is her daughter and she was the editor so that might have had something to do with it but I seriously don't know we're we're just about done here I just wanted to say that House of Night is now the worst series I've ever read like the absolute worst it's worse than Elixir because other bad series that I've read on here like Elixir and Throne of Glass those could imaginably be salvaged like Elixir you could keep the same basic idea for a story and as long as you changed well let's face it everything about the execution it would be a decent story but it would uh well it would still be recognizable you know what I mean like it would still be oh okay this was the original idea let's go with that and whereas with House of Night if you were to change it to make it good it would be totally unrecognizable by the end it would be a different story all together so there's nothing good here there's nothing at all and as bad as Elixir was it was also mercifully short this one was not this one was really long and the insanity just all the different directions it went in this book the series feels like a child's fever dream which they then tried to tell to somebody else and then somebody else wrote it down because this just goes all over the place and so that's why I have to say this is worse than Elixir not just because like the characters are bad or the plot is bad or anything but it is just a mad collection of wavings so yes this is the worst series I've ever read it's still not worse than Lovely Bones and stop asking me to do a video on it I talked about it in my top 10 worst videos or my top 10 worst books video and that's all I want to say about it it's terrible so I just want to give a quick update real quick in the original poll that I believe I mentioned I had a four book series on there there was Throne of Blast and House of Night Vampire Academy and the fifth wave on there as well and I've decided I'm not gonna do Vampire Academy because like I said I read the first book years ago and while it was bad it wasn't really all that bad there was still stuff in there that I enjoyed and honestly this came out around the same time House of Night and Vampire Academy came out around the same time so I'd say either of them is a rip off of the other they're both kind of a rip off of Harry Potter but Vampire Academy is like doing pretty much the same thing as House of Night but at least the first book was well it really wasn't that bad so I doubt that the rest of the series is gonna top this at all and I'm not saying that every bad book I read from now on has to top this it would have to try really hard to do that but yeah I'm not gonna do Vampire Academy I've decided I'm gonna replace it with Fallen by Lauren Kate I believe and I saw the movie for Fallen a few weeks ago it was oh god it was hilariously bad it was so awful I hated it so much and I loved how much I hated it but there's that and the fifth wave I will probably do the fifth wave before I do Fallen just because Fallen is also about like magic and Fallen Angels and stuff so I'm like I wanna get away from that wheelhouse a little bit even if I'm looking for stuff that's terrible so yeah the fifth wave is gonna come before that and I really wanna get Michael Bloomberg's daughter's horse books in there somewhere but honestly even all the bits I've read from them I just don't know if there's enough material to do the whole video like this so we'll see what I do with that but yeah so whatever terrible book series I read next there's gonna be a gap there was originally supposed to be a much bigger gap between Throne of Glass and this but Throne of Glass just took me a lot longer and this one I really just wanted to get it over and done with while I was in quarantine and yeah thanks a whole bunch for watching thanks again for watching if you got this far and if you're a patron your name should be up here thanks to you guys especially Oppo Savilainen, Brother Santotis Christopher Hawkins, Christopher Quinten Joel, Joseph Pendergraft Taylor Briggs, Tobacco Crow and Vaivictus you guys are pretty great and obviously if you watch this far you're pretty great too this thing is almost two hours long and let me tell you it was it was painful not just reading but also having to record it going back and editing everything and I'm sorry if I didn't touch on every little bit that you wanted me to but seriously if I did that this video would be five hours long and if you're really curious about the unpleasantness of this series check it out yourself it's genuinely pretty funny anyways I'll see you next time bye