I first heard of Chuck Wendig when he was a twitter dunk of the day for his "fuckcrustable" posting style, and mostly because he sued the Internet Archive. However, I read this for a local book club. The prose had tough-to-read gory moments that I had to pause for, and the writing drew some chuckles, but the overall story is a little bloated. There was a moment where I felt like I was reading the climax of the story, but actually had another 25% left.
This book started out with a cool concept, a creepy serial killer and a strange town, but as it went on it just never stopped adding more things. Too many concepts and ideas that never came together in a good way. It just unraveled and became very messy and I wasn’t a big fan. I really wish it cut back on a lot of the things it had and had more focus.
There were characters that felt very unnecessarily tacked on, weird twists just for the sake of twists, just strange things with no real purpose. It felt long, and not in a good way.
There were a lot of interesting ideas but would have done so much better as separate stories. I really wish they had been. Overall, I just didn’t really like it.
This was only okay. Even in this third revision of Wendig's self-proclaimed "trunk novel", there was too much stuff for one book here, and the conclusion did not feel satisfying.
A mother's love, a father's pain, and a child who feels the suffering of everyone he sees are just three of the main elements I loved in this masterpiece of supernatural horror. I just now finished this book, and I'm trying to collect my thoughts, but I do believe my mind is literally blown away. I can think of nothing remotely adequate to express the sheer perfection of this story and the way the author kept so many plates spinning in the air at once without ever coming close to dropping even one. I don't feel like I should say anything about the plot because telling you more than what you see in the synopsis may take away the enjoyment of discovering it for yourself. I'm just going to focus a bit on the writing and say that at over 500 pages, not a single paragraph was wasted, the pace …
A mother's love, a father's pain, and a child who feels the suffering of everyone he sees are just three of the main elements I loved in this masterpiece of supernatural horror. I just now finished this book, and I'm trying to collect my thoughts, but I do believe my mind is literally blown away. I can think of nothing remotely adequate to express the sheer perfection of this story and the way the author kept so many plates spinning in the air at once without ever coming close to dropping even one. I don't feel like I should say anything about the plot because telling you more than what you see in the synopsis may take away the enjoyment of discovering it for yourself. I'm just going to focus a bit on the writing and say that at over 500 pages, not a single paragraph was wasted, the pace was flawless and the short chapters kept me hungry for more. Every time I would tell myself just one more chapter before I go to bed I would justify reading 3 or 4 more because like little salty snacks they were just too delicious to stop at one.
I love an old fashioned good versus evil story and Wendig delivers that in spades, but more than that he took the time to bring his characters to life, which for me is an important part of any horror novel because if I can not care about the characters I can not fear what may happen to them. This is my first read by this author, although he has been on my radar for about a year now. I am sure this book is going on my best horror novels of 2021 list.
