Second Bookses

The concept of B. Justin Shier's Zero Sight has it all: vampires, a Harry Potter-like magic school, and a near-future dystopian universe, as well as enough violence to keep even boys reading. When we meet Zero Sight's hero, Dieter, he's living in a collapsing Las Vegas and in a fight for his life, with the ridiculously named school gang, the Splotches (we'll give it a pass, since they aren't around long). After the fight ends with a dead bully, an exploded chem lab, and an injured Dieter, he meets a doctor who says she'd recommend him for her mysterious college: Elliot. After the other schools he applies to either turn him down or fail to give him the financial aid he'll need to attend, Elliot offers him a full ride. On the bus trip there, he meets the (also) mysterious Rei, and learns Elliot is not all it seems.The premise of Zero Sight really is something that would probably appeal to most teens, blending most of the recent trends into one book, but it falls short in explaining most of it. The explanation for the attacks on Elliot's incoming students and faculty is too complicated to understand, and the back story even more complicated. In addition, we never learn how Dieter got his power (like the Harry Potter story, most mages inherit their power from their parents), nor why he is so much more powerful than most of the other students. Most of the story goes unexplained, , ostensibly to be explained in later books in the series.Even worse is the fair-to-middling copy editing job; many typographical errors -- especially apostrophes for plurals -- are present, distracting from the complicated story. Zero Sight was a book that had a lot of promise it simply didn't live up to.