In horror, it’s important to establish the atmosphere right away. Instead there’s an author’s note that takes up literally the first 3% of the book. When you have to include in your story a line like “a lot of this is going to make sense very soon,” you’re begging the audience to hang in there because you’re afraid they’ll walk away. That isn’t a good sign. The author goes off into winding asides on anything and everything, particularly people. He drops it in the weirdest places, like part-way through a paragraph that’s about something only semi-related.
There’s another telling quote: “If you hop on the web and do a search on this place”–then the main character recites a bunch of information that sounds like a Wikipedia entry. It’s completely uninteresting and, well, weird. I don’t want my horror fiction to read like a Wikipedia entry. Then, after suffering from an extended bout of verbal diarrhea, the main character suddenly gets coy with his secrets.
There are some bizarre word usages in here (“Crystal still felt swooned by him”; “girls of mixed gender”–I think he meant to say mixed race, but in this book it’s hard to be sure). We get into dangerous territory as Matt insists his only luck with the girls comes from his car and his money, then immediately a female friend thinks about all the things she loves about him, and how amazing he is.
There’s a group of four people here who are getting back together after… uh, I couldn’t really tell you. It seems they’ve been apart for a few years, but were friends in high school maybe? Except that one girl supposedly wouldn’t even give Danny the time of day in school. We seriously need something to straighten out the timeline, because otherwise it feels like there are a lot of contradictory things here.
That’s about where I gave up. Since I couldn’t finish the book I won’t review it on Amazon or Goodreads. I won’t give it a rating. I’m just here to tell you why I didn’t like it, so hopefully you’ll be able to tell whether or not it might interest you.
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