The Dream Hunter by Sherrilyn Kenyon

The Dream Hunter wasn't on my original Fall Reading Challenge list but I won it in a drawing, the first time I've won anything in years and I was curious to read it. I thought it was part of a vampire hunter series and wanted to give it a try. It turns out that this is a separate new series by the same author about dream hunters.

What are dream hunters? It's a little bit involved but they are Greek in origin; they were placed under a curse by Zeus, god of all Greek gods, and haunt the dreams of humans so that they can temporarily feel emotions again. I can't remember exactly what they did to piss Zeus off so much that he condemned them to a void of emptiness, a world without emotions. One of these dream hunters, Arikos, is particularly addicted to the dreamer's emotions and when he finds someone with especially vivid dreams he tends to latch on like a drug addict.

He finds such a dreamer in Dr. Megeara Kafieri, whose father spent a lifetime seeking Atlantis. She has some pretty bitter feelings toward her father because over the years, almost everyone in her family has died in this search for Atlantis. After his death, she receives from an old family friend coins that her father found and wanted to give her. They seem to be from Atlantis and so she becomes re-energized and decides to take up the search again.

Meanwhile, Arik keeps invading her dreams. It gets to the point where one of the other dream hunter gods comes and forbids Arik to visit Megeara again but Arik is too hooked on a feeling and so he makes an outrageous bargain with Hades: make him human for two weeks in exchange for a human soul.

The beginning was all right and I rolled along thinking this was a nice light fluffy bit of story, probably best at the beach, but not terrible at all. All of a sudden, about a third to half way through the book, it bogged down and at times was very unpleasant to slog through. Too many unfamiliar characters were introduced and the story just seemed to go from whimsical to silly. Oh well. Although this particular book ended up being disappointing, I wouldn't give up on the author yet. I would still like to try one of the vampire hunter books.