Carnival of Souls by Melissa Marr

Publisher's summary: In a city of daimons, rigid class lines separate the powerful from the power-hungry. And at the heart of The City is the Carnival of Souls, where both murder and pleasure are offered up for sale. Once in a generation, the carnival hosts a deadly competition that allows every daimon a chance to join the ruling elite. Without the competition, Aya and Kaleb would both face bleak futures—if for different reasons. For each of them, fighting to the death is the only way to try to live.

All Mallory knows of The City is that her father—and every other witch there—fled it for a life in exile in the human world. Instead of a typical teenage life full of friends and maybe even a little romance, Mallory scans quiet streets for threats, hides herself away, and trains to be lethal. She knows it's only a matter of time until a daimon finds her and her father, so she readies herself for the inevitable. While Mallory possesses little knowledge of The City, every inhabitant of The City knows of her. There are plans for Mallory, and soon she, too, will be drawn into the decadence and danger that is the Carnival of Souls.

My take: Holy crap! Melissa Marr has an extremely demented mind. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised after reading her Wicked Lovely series! Or even by going to her book signings and getting toe tags as swag! But even then, I did not at all expect Carnival of Souls to be so crazy bizarre. And that is not, at all, in a bad way…I absolutely loved it! Carnival of Souls only just proved what a brilliant, unique, writer that Melissa Marr is. This is one of those books that when you start reading it, you wouldn’t even try to make a prediction of where the story will lead.

In the Carnival of Souls, the story is written from the POV of several different characters, and each character is completely unique. So we get to experience this bizarre world Melissa created through several different viewing angles. And she actually ties up all the angles in the end…quite amazingly. When I first started reading, and even throughout the story, I had trouble deciding if I even liked any of the characters. I don’t want to say too much to avoid spoiling anything, but right when I thought that I might like a character, that character would do something that would totally baffle me and leave me wondering, “Is this supposed to be a bad guy, or a crazy, demented good guy?” Luckily, in the end, we finally see where each character stands, and you can decide for yourself if you think they are good or bad.

It’s not just the characters in Carnival of Souls that are extraordinary; it’s the lifestyle of the daimons that are even stranger. It’s baffling to think that these daimons would actually choose to live in The City, rather than trying to live in the human world.

The ending of Carnival of Souls leaves at a cliffhanger, but it didn’t kill me to leave the story from there. And I’m more than eagerly hoping that there will be a sequel…and soon.