A slick story about fighting fantastic creatures against one another. Available online.

Back when Julius Ceasar ruled the Roman Empire, gladiator games were all the rage. Humans – usually criminals – fought with wild animals for the cheap entertainment of an audience that cared far more for a “good show”, than the lives lost and bloodshed.

This story is a gladiatorial game with mythological creatures. Here, unicorns are fighters.

[…] train them like you train dogs for a cage match. Get them young, young as you can. Starve them. Beat them. Slip blood into their milk. Give them a taste for it. Keep them hungry and angry all the time. Pervert them until they don’t know which way is up anymore. That’s how you make a unicorn, a natural pacifist, a fighter.

This story is also prologue to the Necromancer series, which is a bad, bad thing for people like me, whose to-read list of books is numbered in the hundreds. It does not help that I like the characters and the way they were written and don’t mind reading more of them.

The unicorn of the story is Steve, nicknamed Phantom. Neither of the names are what people would associate with unicorns. He wasn’t trained to the methods above, but when he enters a fight with his partner Lena, it always ends unexpectedly, because they weren’t there to play by the rules, they were there to beat the rules. Chaos reign, and then they ride off heroically – or at least, that’s the plan. The second part doesn’t always happen, but is the preferred ending, anyway.

We’re supposed to be badasses, walking off into the sunset, the smell of victory in the air. Your sneezing fit is ruining our image.”

If you loved Twilight, I've got a feeling you'll hate The Immortal Rules by Julie Kagawa. There's vampires in both. And a bland love interest. That's where the similarities end. Because where Twilight is packed with simpering, soggy romance, hormonal staring and shivering, The Immortal Rules is filled with bloodied heads rolling along dusty floors, wild eyed zombies clawing for a beating heart to chew on and burning buildings collapsing to ash around us.

Allison is a street kid, struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world ruled by vampires. Humans live a caged existence, trapped in cities under the guise of protection by the vampires from the Rabids, that prowl beyond the wall, created by Red Lung virus which has swept the earth, killing the vast majority of the population. In reality, these humans are used like cattle as a source of food for the vampires who bleed the Registered regularly to sustain themselves, leaving the Unregistered, like Allison to fend for themselves, starving and without shelter. Following a near-death experience, Allison is transformed into a vampire by the formidable master vampire, Kanin only to be driven from the city, alone in the wilderness when it transpires that he is the most wanted vampire in the city due to his involvement in the downfall of humanity. Wandering and somewhat desperate, Allison happens upon a band of travelling humans searching for the safety of Eden, a city apparently existing without vampire intervention where humans can live free and at peace. A whole lotta shit goes down as Allison struggles to hang on to her humanity as the monster inside her becomes increasingly desperate to be released.