Book review: Stuart Neville returns with ravenous, bloody sequel

Horrific tale hits close to home while highlighting an important message: Be careful who you trust, anyone could be lurking in the night

Stuart Neville: While being set against a realistic and modern landscape, the term 'vampire' never appears in 'Blood Like Ours'. Picture: Johanne Atkinson

• Blood Like Ours 
• Stuart Neville 
• Simon & Schuster, £9.99/ £16.99

Stuart Neville’s newest novel — a sequel to last year’s bestselling Blood Like Mine — is a scary tale about the things that go bump in the night, specifically the bloodthirsty ones.

Picking up soon after the ending of the first book, Blood Like Ours starts off on an electric note. 

Rebecca Carter is back from the dead after waking up in the El Paso morgue with a nasty bullet wound that should have put the nail in her coffin. 

While she struggles to remember exactly what happened to her, a deep hunger rumbles in her stomach and demands an odd craving: Human blood. 

As she desperately tries to satisfy her thirst, she pieces together how she ended up in this situation in the first place, and soon realises that it all leads back to her daughter, Monica, who goes by the nickname Moonflower.

Before everything falls apart in a chaotic mess, Moonflower and her mother travel across southwestern America to satisfy her ravenous hunger. 

But she doesn’t have the diet of a normal teenager. Instead, she craves the blood running through a human’s veins. 

If she goes too long without feeding, the hunger takes over, causing her to lose all control. 

‘These people are best left alone. The more you try to control them, the more desperate they get, the more harm they do, either to themselves or others.’

The duo try to be as ‘fair’ as possible with their kills, with Rebecca stalking social media in search of bad people to become Moonflower’s next meal, ones the world might be better off without.

Their actions eventually catch up to them in the form of an obsessed FBI agent, Marc Donner, who goes off the rails and is killed by other agents in his craze — but not before he shoots Rebecca and lands her in the morgue.

Now, convinced her mother is dead, a lonely Moonflower fends for herself in the wilderness, with a pack of dogs and coyotes as her only company. 

But it isn’t long before her hunger grows into an ugly, overpowering monster that rages a war inside her, and she can only hold it off for so long.

That is until she stumbles across two young brothers, Jacob and Willard Hendry, who know all too well about her inhuman thirst — and who are determined that Moonflower come with them.

Soon, Rebecca starts tracking the trio, her worry for Moonflower overpowering everything else, but unbeknownst to her, someone is hot on her trail. 

FBI agent Sarah McGrath, still grieving the death of her partner, Marc, is determined to avenge him by confronting Rebecca and putting a stop to the murdering mother once and for all.

Her obsession lands her in hot water at work, and her personal life — including her wife and their son — begins to suffer as a consequence.

The fast-paced novel also features diary entries from Emma Wilson, a young girl from Northern Ireland who moves to America in the late ’90s with her best friend Imelda, a pocketful of dreams shared between the two. 

Their idyllic lives are soon disrupted when their paths cross with a shadowy, handsome figure whose pale skin and mysterious persona draw them in.

While being set against a realistic and modern landscape, the term “vampire” never appears in Blood Like Ours, which creates a grounding effect that makes the horrific tale hit much closer to home while highlighting an important message: Be careful who you trust, anyone could be lurking in the night.

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