Life sucks when you’re a baby-faced kid in LA—broke, girlfriend-less, and stuck in a dead-end job.
And when we’re talking about Dave Miller, we really mean dead-end.
Life sucks harder when that job is night manager at the Last Stop, LA’s finest vampire-owned 24-hour convenience store, and you’re facing an eternity of restocking beef jerky and blood brew for Radu, your crappy boss and Vampire Master.
It’s bad enough that Dave pines for his days as a vegetarian, but when he finds himself competing with psychotic surfer-vamp Wes for the affections of Rosa, a beautiful mortal with a romantic fixation on the dark side, unlife really gets complicated.
Co-written with Gabe Soria
Drawn by Warren Pleece
Read an 11-page excerpt on Vulture
Buy Life Sucks on Amazon.com
or via your local independent bookstore.
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What they’re saying about Life Sucks
This hilarious tale strikes perilously close to the reality of the slacker twenty-something life. Abel and Soria hit their mark with plenty of attitude and just enough snark to let their characters come to life. Warren Pleece’s art marvelously captures the humor of the mundane that lend the book’s crew of late-night wage-slave vamps believability and energy. A really fun read!
– Booklist
It’s a story of what it’s like to be in your mid-twenties without a clue about where you’re going or who you want to be….a fascinating, thoughtful read.
– School Library Journal
The verdict: The combo of vibrant illustrations and biting social commentary make this one of this year’s most entertaining reads. In the cluttered field of vampire tales, Abel’s and Soria’s hip take really raises the stakes. The characters are all complex, and their plight reveals culture/immigrant clashes in this nation.
– The Mercury News
Within this love triangle an incisive satire of Goth subculture and its obsession with vampires emerges (the real vampires mock the poseurs). Well-chosen rich, dark-coloured panels conjure the California stripmall milieu seen at night, capturing dusk and dawn without being gloomy. It’s a long, satisfying read that both subverts and rises above the paranormal genre, giving even minor characters room to breathe, and deglamorizes, if you will, the vampire mystique.
– The Globe and Mail
Abel and Soria’s light approach, combined with Pleece’s bright, Technicolor art, gives the book an entertaining Joss Whedon gloss to its Gen-Y bloodsucking melodrama.
– Publishers Weekly
Life Sucks: A YALSA Top Ten Great Graphic Novel for Teens
YALSA, the Young Adult Library Services Association of the American Library Association, has not only picked Life Sucks as one of its annual list of Great Graphic Novels for teens, but has also named it one of the “quick picks” top ten!
YA librarians (and the kids they serve) are really catching on to Life Sucks. There was a nice mention of the book as well on this librarian’s list of most underappreciated YA books of 2000-2009, and I was also recently a guest of Books for the Beast, a YA conference in Baltimore, largely because of Life Sucks.
Buy Life Sucks on Amazon.com
or via your local independent bookstore.
