John Olson’s Shade, released in 2008 from B&H Publishing Group. According to the acknowledgments in the back, John took an early draft of Shade to the Mount Hermon writer’s conference in 1998 and discovered that the Christian market wasn’t ready for a vampire story. Well, all things happen in God’s timing, not ours. Ten years later, the time was right and Shade was published. Hearing that story makes me excited about how things are slowly changing for Christian speculative fiction. Cool stuff is here. More cool stuff is coming.

Shade is the story of two people. Hailey is a graduate student who thinks she might be hallucinating. She’s certain a man chased her into Golden Gate Park and that a tall, homeless man rescued her. Melchi is a homeless man, and he did rescue Hailey from a vampire-like creature. But is Melchi as delusional as Hailey? Or maybe he’s the bad guy. Hailey is certain of one thing: there is no such thing as vampires.

This was a wonderfully “weird” novel with lots of interesting twists and turns. John B. Olson has a great way of hooking you with his unique characters. It was creepy, so I recommend it with caution to those who don’t like to be scared. You can read my book review for Shade here. There is a sequel to Shade coming out this fall called Powers. I’m really excited about it.