It really seems like time is up for Darren. Let’s just say that there’s a highly placed traitor in Vampire Mountain an invading force of the vile Vampaneze clan getting ready to strike at the unsuspecting vampires a faithful friend lying lifeless in the dark and one disgraced young hero who, when offered the choice between joining the enemy and certain death, chooses the latter. It isn’t so much what happened that surprised me, as when it happened, and where it left poor Darren at the end of this book. Okay, to be honest, I had noticed some hints and fore-shadowings. And by giving his story a surprisingly surprising twist, he actually surprised me. Just when I was enjoying the predictable groove the book had fallen into-livened up by an escalating series of scary close-calls-author Darren Shan (actually O’Shaughnessy) did the thing I least expected: the unexpected. While none of the possible deaths offered by the randomly-drawn trials sounds much better than that, Darren opts to face fate on his feet.īut after seeing Darren survive his first three trials and growing more confident that he is going to make it through them all, what happens next may not be what you expect.

As you would expect from the ending of Vampire Mountain, Darren must either pass five trials of physical courage, luck, and endurance-any of which could kill him-or, upon failing or wimping out, face execution by being dropped repeatedly into a pit of sharpened stakes. But it looks as if he may need to be drowned, roasted, sliced, and skewered along the way. Cirque Du Freak-or book 2 of the Vampire Rites trilogy, which is the second of four trilogies within the same-half-vampire Darren starts to look less like an eternally whiny teenage git and more like someone with the potential to be a hero. In book 5 of the Saga of Darren Shan, a.k.a.

Trials of death by darren shan