Elliott had been a short, pudgy, unattractive kid with too white skin and carrot red hair that was habitually frizzed out. He was still all those things, but now his pale cheeks were gaunt and his body was hunched, as if it had curled in on itself.

Question: how can someone be pudgy and gaunt at the same time? I'm pretty sure those are contradictory descriptions. Also, describing how weird and animalistic and whatnot the ghost vampires are could have been a legit piece of horror writing if they'd actually gone into that instead of having Zoey harp on how ugly he was before. Then again, given how shallow and judgmental this character is about everything, throwing in another description, even a really good, horrific one, might not have helped much. These books are so over-saturated with description already that the Casts might have to find some other way to show that these ghosts are serious business. I kind of doubt that they will, though.

This is also another place where the authors' limited vocabulary hurts the books. If they wanted to emphasize how different this incident of blood-drinking was from the ones Zoey has partaken in, they should have used entirely different words to set the tone. As it is, by using similar descriptors, they fail to create the atmosphere they probably meant to, and they make their main character look like a hypocrite.

And I'm sad to see that this story line looks like it's still taking its sweet time to even be properly recognized as a source of conflict. Coming out of the first book, this was the one plot element I thought might have some promise if the authors ever decided to run with it, so it's disappointing that they're continuing to tease it without really integrating it into the main story.