{Review} Death Inception by Tamara Rose Blodgett (Death #0.5)

From Goodreads: Kyle Ulysses Hart and his team of scientists mapped the human genome in the year 2010. As Brain Impulse Technology came online… so did the long arm of the United States government. A covert, military-driven regime was born with genetic manipulation the key to future widespread control.

When pharmaceutical laboratories, funded by the Graysheets, discover a way to unlock paranormal potential through compulsive inoculation, their exploitative dream is realized.

Clyde and Caleb’s lives are predestined to intertwine as they cross paths, his history becoming Caleb’s future.

A lone teenager named Jeffrey Parker, falls prey when he manifests the rare, Affinity for the Dead. The Graysheets abandon all pretense of stewardship, ripping him from his family for their nefarious purposes.

Can Jeffrey remain who he was destined to be in an environment exclusively built for mass control?

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I am so excited that Blodgett wrote this amazing prequel to her Death series!!!  While I never really had any nagging questions about how everything came to be, and I thought that Blodgett did a great job explaining everything, this novella really opened my eyes and filled in more areas of the series that I hadn’t even realized I wanted to know about! 

Told between alternate time periods, following characters’ lives from the early 1900s to the mid 2000s, readers will learn about the life and death of our beloved Clyde, the beginnings of the human genome project, brain pulse, Parker’s inception with the Affinity for the Dead… and it’s all intertwined amazingly well. 

I’ve been trying to decide when readers should read the prequel—should they read it prior to reading the entire series?  Or maybe after the first or second book?  Honestly, I can’t decide.  Death Inception carries a lot of information that is great to know ahead of time, but I almost feel like readers should wait to read the prequel until they’ve read at least the first novel in the Death series so that they know the characters’ interworkings and love them as much as I do!  Especially as this novella changed my perspective of a few of the characters, such as Parker, and getting to know their full stories, explaining who they are, and why they are the way that they are, was really exciting, so I like the idea of waiting to read the prequel until after reading at least the first novel in the series!!  But, honestly, it doesn’t matter when you read the prequel, because it’s amazing and fits the story perfectly!  Overall, I highly recommend this series and can’t get enough!! Five stars!

I received a copy of this novel from the author in exchange for an honset review.