The opening book of the Demonata series shows an early glimpse of the horror and gore that is to come. After demons attack and kill his parents no one believes Grubbs Grady about it. The book is tense and it sets us up for the rest of the series with some critical plot devices such as the titled Lord Loss and chessboards. There is an early demon set piece which is amazing but the book can't scale to these heights again. A great and gripping read. ( )

No one believes Grubbs when he says that demons attacked and murdered his mother, father, and sister, except for his Uncle Dervish. So once Grubbs gets out of the mental institution he goes to live with him, little imagining the family secret that awaits him. Will his family's strange deaths be explained, or will his uncle's secrets just pose more questions? ( )

I'm all for the EXTREME CHESS DEATH MATCH, but even that cannot save this book for me. It seems designed to snag whatever parts of the YA demographic that have not been sucked into the Twilight vortex. ("Not interested in reading an epic romance about a sparkly vampire? Try this book about demons eating parents instead! There are copious amounts of blood!")

I liked how the hero, Grubbs Grady, gets a hard wake-up call to the realities of his world when his immediate family is slaughtered by demons, and I thought the reveal of that scene and the aftermath with Grubbs stuck in a cycle of psychiatric observation was extremely well done. But shortly after Grubbs' sole surviving adult family member arranges for Grubbs' release from observation, the narrative completely stalls and my interest took a sharp nosedive. First, wouldn't you logically expect a young teenager – having directly witnessed demons eating his family and having spent weeks in an asylum desperately pretending this hasn't happened for fear that he'll prove himself to actually be crazy, but then discovering that his uncle is the one adult in his world who believes in the demons too and who then spirits him out of the asylum to safety – to maybe ask this uncle about why this horrible thing has happened to him? You wanna know how long it takes Grubbs do to this? One. Hundred. Pages. I was getting to the point while reading this that I seriously wondered if I'd accidentally skipped over the paragraph that explained this.

It's as if the author was deliberately trying to slow the pace of this book, and I can't think of a single reason why he would want to do so. The beginning grips you instantly and the ending is really good, but the middle? Ugh – the story stops dead. Does Shan think teens can't handle reading a novel at breakneck speed and needed some sort of slow place where they could catch their breath? That teens would be unable to relate to a story entirely about a badass demon-fighting protagonist with a burning urge to stay alive and that it would be a better idea to tone it down for a few chapters to that teens could instead read about a protagonist doing exciting things like watch movies with a friend in his living room? Or did he just had a passing whim to switch the story's genre entirely from horror to light mystery but then changed his mind and switched it back to horror again at the end? It makes no sense. If you want to write a horror story, make it horror.

Grubbs himself suffers from this sort of random competence switchover. He starts at as a sadistically nasty little brother – rigging a shower to pour rotten, liquefied rat guts on your naked sister assuredly counts as sadistic behavior – but he quickly goes through that horrible opening event and starts behaving very believably within the confines of the story, but once he gets to his uncle's house he starts acting like a careless moron and jettisons any of the experience bonus points he would have gained earlier. But then by the very end of the book, Grubbs has another great growth of responsibility and maturity and becomes interesting again. I want to throttle the author. Pick a characterization already, Shan.

I would have loved this story if it had been rewritten with a more even hand. The plot had a great premise, and Shan shows loads of creatively. As the story currently stands, the characters' behavior is too frustrating for me to enjoy.

ETA: I lent this book to my younger brother, who's in his mid-twenties and so a little old to be part the target demographic of this book, but he likes the YA books and he's very in to this sort of gorefest plotline. He friggin' loved the book, read it in the space of a week or two (books normally take him months to read), and approached me with a direct inquiry to see if I had any other titles in this series. (This never happens!) So Shan must be doing something right. ( )

This book is an interesting read. I begins with a young student at home trying to get out of trouble with his parents from a situation in school....His parents feel that he should go away and spend a bit of time away from home. The young student feels that something is wrong and he sneakss his way back home and he finds that his world has turned upside down. His parents are now dead and a part of a world of black magic, all he finds of them are thier heads hanging on a web. He notices some characters that soon chase him and he discovers that there is a deep secret his family was hiding from him. This young man is able to escape and learn about his family and his future from the help of an uncle that becomes his friend and his guardian. ( )

Don't be put off by the demonistic cover of "Lord Loss." With a firm basis in a real setting, it is far better of a story than it seems. It starts in a conventional way with a teenage boy, Grubbitsch "Grubbs" Grady, battling with his family, particularly his sister. Coming home unexpectedly--this is where the book takes the demon turn--Grubbs finds his family brutally murdered by beings that do not exist in the real world. Only after his mysterious uncle shows up and confirms what Grubbs has seen does he realize something more horrific than can be imagined has happened. Grubbs moves in with his uncle and joins his family's generations-long battle with the entity known as the Demonata. ( )