I've had very lukewarm feelings towards American Vampire thus far. The series has not thoroughly set itself apart from the mile-high stacks of vampire fiction dumped behind every library, spending a lot of its time camped out in "Now I'm a vampire, what do I do?" territory. 
 But this volume may have finally won me over. The story "Death Race," which makes up the middle portion of the book, had me hooked. Full of genuine surprises and a really solid 1950s setting, it did what I've longed for this series to do from the beginning: tell smart, original, HUMAN stories with a backdrop of a world full of vampires. It's part Rebel Without a Cause, part Salem's Lot, and greater than the sum of these. If all the stories in American Vampire were this good, I'd love this series. 
 Unfortunately, more often than not we get stories like the other two in this volume. "The Beast in the Cave" is a half-decent story of a pre-vampire Skinner Sweet and lays some retroactive groundwork for the character he becomes. But, unfortunately, it does what a lot of American Vampire stories do and ends up relying on a "totally new kind of vampire no one's ever seen before." This is also the case in the final story of this book. I want to love these stories, but when they so often just invent a new sort of vampire and treat it like it's terrifying solely because it's different, I get bored. It just isn't that hard to make up a new kind of monster that is slightly different than the other kinds of monsters we've already seen. 
 That said, this volume is worth a read just for "Death Race" alone. That story also has the bonus of not requiring any prior knowledge of the series to understand it, so I might even recommend this as the very first American Vampire volume to read.