In Christopher Golden's world of WAKING NIGHTMARES, the answer to "who ya gonna call" isn't Ghostbusters, but Peter Octavian, former vampire, current mage. Chaos is yawning a hungry mouth in New England and there's only one man (well, one man and a sexy earthwitch) who is going to be able to clean up this rain of toads.

Octavian's a difficult man to get a handle on as a reader. He's smooth, with a more-than-just-an-amateur rockstar girlfriend and a tall bounty-hunter aesthete of his own. He travels the country fighting evil in penance for his past as a blood-sucking fiend (hey, it was a long time ago) but little is said about his motivations beyond a sentence or two of summary. For the most part, he's remarkably, even unsettlingly, even-keeled for a man in a relationship on the rocks who's suffered a thousand years of torment in Hell and has a day job that mostly involves swapping bodily fluids (and not in the fun way!) with evil. In some ways, he's almost too aloof- he swoops in like Superman and almost effortlessly defeats his opponents but there's little to create an empathic link for the reader. He's a man of mystery but it's difficult to be enveloped in a novel where the main protagonist comes across as a chilly cipher.

WAKING NIGHTMARES feels like a Halloween haunted house, where each chapter opens a door on a new frightfest (as well as numerous new characters, many of whom I found to be easier to sympathize with than the superhuman- literally- Octavian). Golden clearly knows his locations and describes the small town atmosphere in a comfortable and familiar manner, one that makes the horror aspects of the book that much more jarring. The supernatural becomes far more believable with such a firm setting beneath it, and the pace is pleasantly fast-moving and dramatic. Overall, the novel reads like a campfire tale that would go well with a trip to the Great Pumpkin Patch, and I will be looking forward to Octavian's continued adventures in hopes of more in-depth insights into his murky character.