Book Report #176 Throat

Throat by R.A. Nelson

If I hadn't read Nelson's stuff before, I probably would have dismissed this as just another teen vampire novel. Luckily, I knew he is a master storyteller, and Throat would be worth reading.

Throat is Emma's story. She's a 17-year old with epilepsy. Her frustration surrounding her illness really revs up her teenage angst. Her single mom does her best to keep her in check but it's a Herculean task. Emma also has a younger sister who makes her world go round.

In one of her reactive moments after a life-changing seizure, Emma takes off in the car and ends up crashing in the woods. It's there she has a run-in with a vampire, and she's turned. It's amazing she survived the incident at all. She comes to see that she has powers that help her heal, as well as run and jump like a superhero.

The vampire who bit her is a really bad guy, and he threatens to take Emma's sister. Emma spends the rest of the novel dedicated to fighting him. She ends up taking refuge at a NASA base, and meeting someone there who becomes very important to her and her plight. I don't want to give any spoilers! But it's super gripping. I read the whole thing in less than 24 hours.

I really liked the talk about The Feld (field in German) and zero-point energy, and how Nelson applied it to vampires. It's an interesting concept in quantum physics, and I'd previously enjoyed Lynne McTaggart's book The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe on the subject.

General consensus: It's like the best parts of Harry Potter, Stranger Things, and Home Alone got together and wrote a story about science and vampires.