Spoiler Free zone
While I felt this book had a decent premise, I feel it could use a few more edits. I felt the writing itself could have been better handled and that the story line tried to do too much, thus causing it to be convoluted and, at points, uninteresting. Perhaps after going through a serious editing process, this book will be made great but as it stands now I can only give it a 1.5 out of 5 stars and I don’t personally recommend it to anyone. Spoiler Zone The first and most pressing issue in this book is that that writing needed to be handled better. By that I mean that there was a lot of simple grammar mistakes and a lot of the writing fell into the same traps writing schools teach against. There was even an entire chapter that was repeated in the book which implies that the book was never given any serious thought. Furthermore, the point of view shifted so frequently and without any sort of transition that it was really hard to tell who the speaker of each section was and where they were. In fact, the timeline itself gets lost in the constantly shifting point of view. Especially since, due to these shifts, the author kept going back in time to tell the reader what was going on with a different character during the same time that other things went on with the rest of the group. The other issue is I felt this book followed the cliché of the horror genre: big evil bad guy kills nearly everyone in the story in the most bloody and gruesome way possible until a special hero is able to kill the bad guy. It read like something I’ve read before which isn’t a good sign since I typically don’t read or watch anything in the horror genre (because I’m a big scardy-cat.) At some point, I had to start keeping a list of who was dead because it felt like the number of bodies piled up so quickly. The other reason it was so difficult for me to keep track of who was dead and who was still alive is because there were just so many characters and they were so underdeveloped that I really didn’t know who they were or feel connected to them. In fact, I would have to go through the book even as I write this review to remember the names of the characters because the characters seemed so unimportant to the story that I’ve forgotten them. There were a lot of good threads that I felt were started in this book but they weren’t ever brought to a satisfying close. There was the question of religion which is brought in through the creation of these creatures, the question of life and death with the thought of ghosts interacting with living people, and there was the question of who really was the monster when the monsters bring up the fact that humans destroy everyone and everything around them anyway. There was so much in this story and I would have loved if the author had picked one of them and elaborated it into a concrete idea. There is something in this book that works, it just has to be unburied from under the parts that aren’t working. There were also a lot of strange additions to the story that I don’t understand the purpose for. For example, when the two kidnappers/ would be murderers appear, I thought it might have a purpose. But in the end, the three new characters were killed so quickly after their appearance they didn’t need to be there. In fact, one was killed off set and his death only briefly mentioned. I recommend the author take this book to an editor and work on rewriting it. I think with a lot of work, this could be a great book. However, right now its reads as a hastily written first draft.
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