Goblin

It's so bad. It's just SO BAD. Calling it horror is laughable. Calling it novellas is laughable. Calling it a novel is -you guessed it- laughable.

The biggest culprit is the pacing. As others have said in reviews, this is not novellas. It's short stories that have been stretched -painfully stretched- to be a certain length. It feels like reading in slow motion, or that the words are somehow dripping with molasses.

On top of that, the entire reveal is always rushed at the very end of the story.

And absolutely nothing in it is scary. Or even tense, really. Part of that is because of the pacing, but it's also just reads like a frickin children's book. Everything is so flat.

The last complaint is that it's not even a novel. The stories have absolutely nothing to do with each other they just happen to take place in the same town, which -aside from the name- only has the recurring theme of how often it rains there.

The prologue was decent, probably because it was so short. But the epilogue, which completed it, was of course trash.

Every other story was either grossly predictable; Happy Birthday, Hunter was the only chapter that had anything even remotely like a satisfying ending that gave me anything beyond a "duh" or "that's it"? And it still wasn't worth the length.

So little goes on in every story. It uses the stupid cliches of an entire story being a flashback and almost an entire story being a dream. Absolutely strips whatever suspense it could have been. By The Hedges, it feels like a an absolute scam; it starts with "the ending is SO crazy, you'll never believe it, just trust me. Keep reading."

Absolutely nothing about this book worked. There was no tension because, for all the time it spent on trying to build the characters of "plot" (of which there was almost always barely any), none of it was engaging. Or scary. Or creepy. And NONE of it made me care about the characters in the slightest.

The dialog was passable, as in not cringeworthy, but that's all that can be said. Palatable. Like an unflavored rice cake. That's actually a decent analogy for the entire book: it's like eating nothing but 50 rice cakes in a row. Of course there are people out there that adore rice cakes and wouldn't mind eating them for every meal. But for the rest of us, good God, man, there's SO many more tasteful treats that it's almost masochism to submit yourself to this.

The book absolutely didn't keep my attention. The only way I was able to finish it at all (other than spite to know just how worthless it was from start to end) was the fact that it was split into separate stories. Even that felt like a cheap cop out because all it accomplished was inspiring the thought "well, maybe the next one will be better".

It's been a while since a book made me this mad, especially a fiction book. It's staggering to me that this exists beyond one of those books that sites give away for free. It would take a revelation from a deity I don't believe in or severe memory loss to get me to ever pick up something by Josh Malerman again.

These six novellas are all connected by the theme of a weird and creepy little town called Goblin. Other than the strange place with a dark history they don't share much else. I had high expectations from the start because I do love home town horror. In Goblin it rains all the time and people are buried standing up. The police force is referenced in a way that made me wonder whether the officers are human, or even alive. I will leave it to you to determine what they are when they play a more prominent role in the last story. Aside from what is listed above there is also a bonus story told in two parts. It begins as a welcome and ends in an epilogue at the end of the book.

My favorite story was Presto which is about a boy who is obsessed with magic, and his favorite magician who comes to perform a midnight show in Goblin. I found it deliciously dark and creepy, and although I was interested in Peter I was mostly enjoying the back story of the magician who started out as a failure before making a pact that gave him real magic instead of tricks. This story was a 5 star read for me.
My least favorite was A Mix Up at the Zoo. It had long passages of dream scenes and the ending was too obvious from the start. I don't care for dream sequences and they always seem over used. It may just be me but when I see pages of italics and I know it's not happening but a dream of what's happening I get the urge to skim. This was a 2 star read for me.
A Man In Slices was a 4 star read for me. It was mainly about a strained childhood friendship, and letting the guilt one feels when wanting to cut ties with someone hold you hostage when you are the only friend they have. If anything this story will convince you to make a clean break before it's too late.
The other three stories landed somewhere in the middle for me and if they were separate novellas I would give them 3 stars each.
I was really enjoying the welcome part of the book and I was so into this story! I was dying to know what this delivery was about. When I finally got to the epilogue where this story continues I was hoping it was somehow going to tie everything together but it mostly stayed in it's own lane.
All in all it was a decent collection that I would rate 3.25 out of 5 stars.

I received an advance copy for review.