For 15-year-old Charlie Harker, nothing could be worse than a summer vacation spent renovating a rundown hotel in the pokey little town of Rolling Hills. Exotic holidays in Hawaii are more his style, but his wealthy family has fallen on hard times, and his mother has put Charlie and his siblings to work getting the inn up and running. Charlie may be a wisecracking master slacker adept at avoiding labour of any kind, but he’s no match for his mom. Very quickly, however, Charlie discovers that living in a place overrun by zompires (zombie vampires) is way worse than scraping paint off an old house.

Nova Scotia author James Leck’s After Dark is a glorious romp through an undead invasion of a small town. As more people are “infected” by the zompire virus, it falls to the unsquelchable Charlie and his geeky sidekick, Miles Van Helsing, to save the day. Miles, a self-styled expert on all things supernatural and conspiratorial, has a hard time persuading people that this time his paranoia is justified, while Charlie has a clever quip for every occasion, including when he’s at the point of certain death at the hands of the fanged, blank-eyed zompires. As the story progresses, he reaches this point repeatedly, keeping the reader’s heart pounding with fear and laughter.

Through Charlie, Leck makes fun of zombie-vampire conventions, even as he plays them out in all their corny splendour. Snappy dialogue, irreverent humour, and an almost transcendent understanding of what makes a teenage boy tick render After Dark the first irresistibly hilarious and scary instalment in what promises to be a very successful series.