Books: Semi-rural suburban vampire terror-cells and the hobby-shop ninjas who fight them.

Jonathan Maberry's Dead Man's Song is the sequel to his Stoker-Award winning Ghost Road Blues and it picks up immediately where the previous book left off. And I do mean immediately – the first action starts just a few hours after the last conflict in the first book.

To review: Mayberry's horror epic focuses on the residents – human and not-so-much – of the town of Pine Deep, a semi-rural community that has managed to turn its dark past as "America's most haunted town" into a thriving Halloween-centric tourist biz. In the first tome, a perfect storm of villainy – the resurrection of a long-dead serial killer and the arrival of three mundane, but no less brutal big city bank-robbers – turned Pine Deep's preparations for it annual Halloween hootenanny into an unhinged bloodbath.

When Dead Man's Song opens, the community is just starting to recover. Several of the initial book's key characters are hospitalized, missing, or dead. Those still on their feet slowly begin to piece together the conspiracy of human and supernatural elements that begin to threaten their small town. Before the book is over, Pine Deep will face another violent round of conflicts, all building up to a hinted at apocalyptic siege planned for Halloween (the subject of the third and final book in the series).

Compared to Ghost Road Blues, DMS is a more tightly plotted, less frantic book. Part of the charm of GRB was it almost-crazed pacing and kitchen-sink approach to action/horror. It was, in some ways, more energetic than sensible; but the ride was so much fun and Maberry seemed confident that he was, in fact, going somewhere with all his tangled and hanging threads. If Maberry's follow-up had possessed the same near-reckless propulsion, the result would be fatigue. Instead, Maberry takes the time to start connecting the dots, defining the world his characters live in, and outlining the threat that one imagines will turn the third book in the trilogy, Bad Moon Rising, into another explosion of inventive horror/action. Prior to the third book's release I asked Maberry if he planned to use Pine Deep as reoccurring setting and he said, "Well, there isn't much of Pine Deep left after the last book." I think it is safe to assume that the last tome will return to the frantic, barely-controlled giddiness of the first.

As in the first book, Maberry's characters are ably drawn. That most of them are somewhat generic in outline is made palatable by Maberry's excellent dialog, which moves along at a snappy pace and gives all his cast as certain liveliness. A few character relations, however, really stand out for the detail and earnestness Maberry brings. Perhaps the most carefully written and sincerely gripping parts of the book have to do with the luckless newsboy Mike Sweeney and his abusive stepfather Vic Wingate.

For reader's who enjoy King-style epic scares, Dead Man's Song is a worthy follow-up to a promising debut.

Books: The road less traveled.

John Maberry is a curious cat.

He's an inductee into the Martial Arts Hall of Fame – an institution I'd wager most folks didn't even imagine existed. In 2003 Maberry joined such luminaries as Toshiro Mifune, Sonny Chiba, Bruce Lee, Steven Segal, and Jackie Chan in the Hall on the strength of his numerous martial arts guides, a program he runs teaching cops self-defense techniques, and – no fooling – his creation of a self-defense program for handicapped folks, including a program for the blind and one for people in wheelchairs. Seriously. It's called "Steel Wheels."

If that wasn't enough, Maberry is also the founder of an online literary magazine called The Wild River Review and he helps run a writing center called Career Doctor for Writers. He's qualified to give advice, seeing as he's got 900 article, two plays, several songs, and sixteen non-fiction books under his belt.

All this feeds into his paying gig as a motivational speaker.

But wait, there's more. He's written extensively about supernatural folklore and, in 2006, he wrote his first horror novel and it won the Stoker Award for Best First Novel. It was also nominated for Best Novel, but not even Maberry can win all the time.

Basically, Maberry is a freakin' overachiever and he'd be easy to hate. Only problem is, Ghost Road Blues, the aforementioned award winning novel, is an excellent book that deserved the praise heaped upon it.

Almost makes it worse, don't it?

Ghost Road Blues is the opening book of a trilogy of grand-scale horror novels set in the fictional Pennsylvania town of Pine Deep. Pine Deep is a mostly rural hamlet with a thriving historic downtown area full of artsy shops aimed at snagging tourist dollars. Many moons ago, a sinister serial killer stalked Pine Deep. A mob of angry townsfolk lynched the killer and, as time has gone on, Pine Deep has embraced the grand lessons of capitalism and turned their bloody past into thriving Halloween-centric tourism industry. The town markets itself as "The Spookiest Town in America."

Only problem is that horror fiction relishes irony and a civic development plan based on something so clearly sinister is bound to bite you in the ass.

Pine Deep's homegrown serial killer isn't dead. The man the angry citizens lynched was the wrong man: a local blues musician who, in fact, had just struggled with the real murderer and had left him for dead. Now both the serial killer – an evil creature that seems to simply wear the guise of a human – and the ghost of the wrongly executed man are going to duke it out again. And right during tourist season, when the potential chaos and body count will be at their highest levels. Into this mix, add a trio of drugged up and homicidal bank robbers who crash in Pine Deep in an effort to escape a drug deal gone amuck. Season with a mayor who sees visions of dead relatives. Stir in a fundamentalist Christian garage worker who has decided that he's the Sword of God – which means blood will be spilled. Arrange against this plague of evils a police force straight out of The Andy Griffith Show. Finally, garnish with too-smart crows, ghost deer, and a sinister living scarecrow animated by the legions of insects that dwell within him. Good times.

GRB is a classic, post-King American horror epic. That means you get otherworldly forces, a semi-rural setting, and multiple interwoven plotlines that blend supernatural scares with the banal evil of dysfunctional families and small town injustices. A thumbnail sketch makes it sound like a same-old, same-old exercise in horror lit, but that doesn't take into account Maberry's writing. Maberry keeps everything snapping along. The descriptions are well-observed, the characters do exactly what's needed of them, and the plot hums. The horror and gore are expertly controlled: you get just enough to scare without tipping over into bloody absurdity. My wife, curious about what was in these horror paperbacks I bring home, read the first few chapters involving a scare that, as the plot moves along, turns out to be a false alarm. She later said to me, "If that's the fake scare, I don't want to know about the real one."

If I've got any caveat to give, it's that Ghost Road Blues is not really a stand-alone book. It has a narrative arc all its own, but it is clearly ends on the assumption that you'll stick around for the next two installments. The second novel, Dead Man's Song, is already out and the third book, Bad Moon Rising, is due out mid-2008. If you don't want to be in for a pound, then don't start. Personally, I think the pound's worth it.