The Hunt by Andrew Fukuda

Publisher's summary: Don’t Sweat. Don’t Laugh. Don’t draw attention to yourself. And most of all, whatever you do, do not fall in love with one of them.

Gene is different from everyone else around him. He can’t run with lightning speed, sunlight doesn’t hurt him and he doesn’t have an unquenchable lust for blood. Gene is a human, and he knows the rules. Keep the truth a secret. It’s the only way to stay alive in a world of night—a world where humans are considered a delicacy and hunted for their blood.

When he’s chosen for a once in a lifetime opportunity to hunt the last remaining humans, Gene’s carefully constructed life begins to crumble around him. He’s thrust into the path of a girl who makes him feel things he never thought possible—and into a ruthless pack of hunters whose suspicions about his true nature are growing. Now that Gene has finally found something worth fighting for, his need to survive is stronger than ever—but is it worth the cost of his humanity?

My take: Now this book was bizarre! There are quite a few books out there right now where humans are just about extinct, but out of all of them this one is TRULY unique!

I knew this book was really different from the moment I started listening (I have the audio book) as I immediately started getting the chills and wondered if I even had the stomach to listen to the rest of the book without getting too creeped out. Right from the start, the main character is describing the rules he absolutely must follow to survive in a world where vampires are the dominant species and where “hepers” (humans) are pretty much extinct. He describes an absolutely horrifying scene where a heper breaks one of those rules and is attacked and devoured by a classroom full of vampires!!! So, basically, Gene (main character and human) has to pretend he’s a vamp! Luckily, though, it wasn’t too creepy after that particular scene!

Andrew Fukuda has created a type of vampire in The Hunt pretty much unlike anything else out there. For one, a human could never have a relationship with one of these vampires!!! These vampires sleep, but not in coffins or in the ground…they sleep in “sleep-holds” on the ceiling. But the weirdest difference for me is how these vampires kiss each other! When a male vampire “kisses” a female vampire, he does it by sticking his elbows into the female vampire’s armpits. Bizarre! Right?

From the start of this book until the finish, the whole story was very compelling. I was hooked from the moment Gene was chosen for the hunt, and I could hardly wait to see how the heck he was going to keep the other vampires from discovering who he really was during the “training sessions” for the hunt! And, no, the training sessions didn’t go well for Gene!

One thing that really pissed me off about the book is how Andrew Fukuda emphasized how super “smart” this Gene is. And the reason it pissed me off is because there were so many times throughout the book where I thought Gene was just a big idiot. In fact, I got unbelievably frustrated with him on multiple occasions just because of the stupid things he did…his decision making was so stupid, it was even worse than what I think would be common sense even from someone like me who wasn’t raised to hide that I’m a human from a bunch of vampires!

Anyways, my favorite characters actually come into the story way later, so I can’t talk too much about them. There is one character in particular that I thought showed true promise, but then that character just ended up pissing me off.

The end of The Hunt has a crazy awesome twist, and I’m dying to see where the story will lead and where that twist will take the story!