F. D. Gross

This can be exactly what the doctor ordered...

As long as you've been craving GOOD heavy horror/fantasy films that ramp up the action and the pathos in equal time to fighting the beasties. :) Revenge? Check. Saving his son? Check.

Go Medieval on a ton of monsters? Hell yeah. He IS a vampire hunter, after all. Wolfgang is going to use every weapon available, killing bogarts, swamp things, and of course, VAMPIRES. Traditional ones! With big and beautiful castles! And of course, there's villages and poor people everywhere!

Sound familiar? Well, that's because it is exactly what a lot of us want. :) Castlevania. In novel form. Doing what only novels can do without huge budgets for special effects and big name actors getting their swords bloody.

Who's the ravening fiend, here?

That's right! It's US! We eat this stuff up.

So did I see this as a movie for the entire time I read it?

Yes. I smelled the offal and felt the squish of the swamp in my boots, too.

Okay, yeah, so I'm kinda a sucker for this stuff. Lots of monsters, lots of action, lots of pathos. There's even plot and intrigue that spears through all that action, but for the most part, I was all for the darkness and the horror. :)

I'm a fan, okay!?!?

Thanks to the author for offering this little gem up! I would never have seen it, otherwise! We should all be on the lookout for great independents! :)
… (altro)

This is definitely a much longer book than the first in the trilogy, but by no means does it lack action. In fact, I think these novels would be pretty much perfect for a fully-immersive game. All hack and slash with great descriptions, scenes, and settings.

Gimmie vampires, bogarts, all kinds of ghosts, goblins, and nasties!

What Gross does well, he does very, very well.

Action, eye-candy (please use your imagination), and MORE action. From town to town, countrysides, trains, Wolfgang and his best bud continue their bloody quest.


However... what does it lack?

Hmmm, well, I admit the characters are all pretty one-dimensional. Save his son! At all costs! The few subtleties were nice when they occurred, but in general, there was not a lot of growth or different tones to the tale. It was just as true in the first novel.

The good news is that the fun, fast action DOES manage to carry the full novel and entertain me in rather the same way that Expendables or Wick entertains me. Gimmie carnage! :)

… (altro)

If you like books with lots of monsters such as vampires, bogarts, and zombies, this book is full of them. Everywhere Wolfgang goes there are monsters and more relentless monsters. How many can one man escape from and kill? Wolfgang has lost so much. His home, his wife, his son. I wanted him to find his son so badly and for things to start going well for him. Which is all I will say as I do not want to give away the ending.

There is plenty of action in this first novel by F.D. Gross and the monsters do not let up. If you like horror with scary old fashioned monsters, not the sparkly vampires you see in some fiction and movies today, then you just might like this book.… (altro)

Wolfgang is a vampire novel set somewhere around the seventeenth century. I wasn’t entirely clear of the date. In this novel, Wolfgang is a lord and a vampire hunter. In the opening scene, he is pivotal in the demise of Lord Egleason, who died after taking possession of a relic. Years later, his wife is murdered and his son abducted, by what seems very obvious from the beginning, a reprisal of vampire Lord Egleason. With his Watson-like sidekick, Kromlich, he sets off to find his son and exact revenge.

There were certain things that I liked about this novel. One was the overall quality of the writing. The flow of words, the language used was all to the good. I also enjoyed the incorporation of religion in the story. That is something that is lacking in modern day vampire stories, but works well here. Wolfgang is yet another novel written in first person, present tense—a major pet peeve of mine that I see all too frequently. It’s an illogical way to tell a story, but I digress. The pace needed some work. There were a couple of parts that dragged, but for the most part it was action, action, action, with not enough time given to character development. Finally, I found, especially toward the end, the novel a bit easy to predict. On balance, I though this was a strong novel and a good way to start a series.

Carl Alves – author of Conjesero… (altro)