I have three problems with the Hack/Slash series. The first is that the last few books have seen a lot of effort to get away from episodic mayhem in which chronically under-dressed teen hunter-of-killers Cassie Hack smashes and outwits her way through one supernatural slasher rampage[1] after another, in favor of there being a secret society that causes these guys to live again in the first place. I cannot tell if this is unsatisfying to me because I don’t like the way it’s written or because I don’t want them to tie in an overarching plot and take away the possibility that the adventures continue forever. Either way, I’ve not so much been a fan.

The second problem is that I’m just not that attached to all the secondary characters. Give me Cassie and her misshapen companion Vlad, and I’m perfectly happy. Page after page of teen detectives and unhappy Indianan couples and romantically dissatisfied strippers and… well, okay, the skinless, speaking dog from another dimension is pretty cool, I’ll grant them that one. My point was, every page of those characters is a page that doesn’t have Cassie in it, and I’m pretty enh on the whole concept of her not being the focus. The good news is, Torture Prone is perhaps taking me in the direction I want to go, here.

The third problem is that if you take away the significant cheesecake quotient and consider that I don’t much care for the plot I’m being presented with, there’s almost no reason for me to be reading these. Cheesecake quotient, by itself in a vacuum, really isn’t something I can justify. I mean, I don’t have to justify it, so there’s that, but if this is a thought that I’m thinking, you know something has gone wrong. Upshot: I’m really hoping I was right about the second problem being on the path to resolution, because there are still four or five books before the apparent end of the series.

[1] Jason Vorhees. Chucky the Doll. Freddy Krueger. You know the drill.