Fever Moon, by Karen Marie Moning

First, a word of warning: Fever Moon is the only Karen Marie Moning book that I have ever read, so while I'm finally capable of evaluating a graphic novel without a boatload of preconceived notions about how everyone should look and behave, I'm flying blind when it comes to the series' larger story arc. So... forgive me if I screw something up, okay?

Fever Moon is a standalone installment in Moning's best-selling Fever series. Moning's heroine is MacKayla Lane, a party girl-turned-monster-slayer who ends up in Ireland after her sister's murder, wreaking vengeance while simultaneously fending off a bevy of supernatural love interests. When a fresh horror begins terrorizing the streets of Dublin (and swiping its victims' facial features), Mac has every intention of hunting it down, but her search is complicated by ever-increasing fear as the monster begins to target her friends and family.

Fever Moon was written by Moning, adapted by David Lawrence, and illustrated by Al Rio and Cliff Richards. That's an awful lot of cooks in one literary kitchen, and the results are mixed. I appreciated the quick-and-dirty world building featured in the book's early pages, and found the face-stealing storyline creepily entertaining. Unfortunately, Rio and Richards's competent but utterly generic artwork was a huge turn-off for me, full of Marvel Comics-style females sporting tight clothes, big hair, and even bigger breasts. I suspect the majority of Moning's readers are adult women, not preteen boys, but you'd never know it from the look of this graphic novel, which takes a potentially interesting premise and boils it down to: “Hot blonde has sex, kills monsters, and wears leather pants.”

Review based on publisher-provided copy.