We Who Hunt Alexanders
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Amelia is a ripper, a monster who feeds on violent people who have so thoroughly forsaken love that they've burned away their souls. Unseen and unnoticed by most of society and living as both hunter and hunted, the only emotion rippers feel is anger. But Amelia is different from her fellow rippers and also feels happiness, sadness, fear, love and every other emotion. To her mother, Danjay, that makes Amelia the strangest of all monsters.
Driven from their home by religious zealots, Amelia and Danjay must learn to survive in the city of Medea, where violent men rule and kill anyone who opposes them. Worse, Amelia has never hunted on her own, and her mother is ill and growing weaker by the day. Only a chance encounter with a human who can see Amelia gives her any hope that she might be able to save her mother.
To succeed, Amelia must learn to hunt in an increasingly dangerous city brought to the brink of war by the corrupt, rich and powerful. Amelia will also have to discover if her differences from her fellow rippers makes her weak, as her mother believes, or if she can instead be a new kind of monster that the world has never seen before.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sanford (Plague Birds) centers this flimsy horror-fantasy novella around family drama, cycles of violence, and otherworldly appetites. Teenager Amelia is a ripper, one of a hidden race of predators who feed on violent men the rippers call Alexanders by transforming their mouths into a horrifying maw capable of swallowing entire bodies whole. Amanda is an anomaly, however, due to her ability to experience emotions other than rage; she alone among her kind is able to feel love. Now she and her ailing mother, Danjay, arrive in a new city that proves a hotbed of both Alexander activity and run-of-the-mill religious bigotry. After killing an Alexander, wiping the memories of the man's wife and child, and moving into the family's house, they must decide which humans (and which other rippers) they can trust as dark forces close in around them. Sanford handily brings his characters to life, and horror fans will have a lot of fun digging into both the mechanics of the rippers' anatomies and the worldbuilding that supports the story's central religious conflict. The plot feels incomplete, however, full of ambitious ideas that are hardly given enough time to establish themselves. Readers will be frustrated.
