Book Review: Body Surfing

He'd been shot a dozen times before. Fourteen to be exact. Boris Petrovich Alushkin remained the worst. It was really, really hard to concentrate with a big hole in your temporal lobe, but two shotgun blasts to the chest was a close second. And then falling nine stories? F*** but that hurt. Thank God there was a Town Car idling on the curb to break his fall.

---Body Surfing, pg 176

Jasper and Q are best friends. They're "typical" teenage boys that like wild parties, girls and cars. A strange and sudden change in Q's behavior leads to dangerous consequences and a fatal car crash. Though Q should be dead, he walks away unharmed. Jasper, however, wakes up afterward in a body that is not his own. Ileana Magdalen is a hunter. A demon hunter. She roams the world searching for the Mogran, demons that have existed for millenia, "surfing" from one body to the next, leaving a wake of destruction and devastation. Together Jasper, Q and Ileana must hunt and vanquish Leo, the most heinous demon of all.

Body Surfing sounded like a fascinating book and I was really looking forward to reading it. The story is good and unfolds well throughout the 400 pages with prose that is, at times, quite beautiful and engaging. Dale Peck's writing flows in such a way that it's almost easy to miss the often grisly and bloody scenes that he describes.

Because this book is gruesome. Bloody and violent and horrific.

But that wasn't why I didn't like it.

I know, after saying all those nice things, you probably expected me to sing praises for this tale of good and very, very evil.

But I really didn't like it.

I should first tell you that I have a fairly high tolerance for things that should probably make me cringe.

BUT.

This book is about sex. Not so pure and not so simple. The demons possess whichever hosts they choose and move about from one body to the next by having sex. Which is described again and again in EVERY LAST DETAIL. To the point where I actually got annoyed and BORED during an attempted-rape scene. It was ridiculous. It's basically porn. Except that most of the sexually explicit scenes involve rape and violence.

To be perfectly honest, I got to the halfway point and was so disgusted that I finally just skimmed through the second half of the book, keeping track of the plot while ignoring many scenes. And I swear, if I'd had to read one more reference to male anatomy, I was seriously contemplating putting a hole in my own temporal lobe.

I've seen a few reviews that actually praised this book and I'm sure there are many that would disagree with me. This book was quite definitely not my taste.

However, for those of you that think it might be right up your alley, Body Surfing is available today in paperback, as well as hardcover and eBook format.



Many thanks to Atria books for giving me the opportunity to review another novel. I know this review wasn't what you were hoping for, and I'm sure the next one will be better!