Reviews tagging 'Toxic relationship'

Where the Dead Wait by Ally Wilkes

3 reviews

jan_coco_day's review

adventurous dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I usually get frustrated when secondary characters seem to "vanish" or stop existing when they are not in the scene/on the page. But Wilkes uses this effectively to lay bare Day's obsession with his own loneliness.

The one character who isn't present haunts Day so much that he is "realer" than any of the other characters on the voyage with Day. Much of his isolation is self-imposed.

The story falls apart a little bit at the end at the reveal that there is no larger supernatural horror, but just one psychopath Stevens and his psychopath friends. And they were all pretty easily defeated.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Confinement, Death, Gore, Terminal illness, Toxic relationship, Blood, Medical content, Grief, Cannibalism, Murder, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Gaslighting, Abandonment, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Emotional abuse, Colonisation, and Classism

blacksphinx's review

challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This book is a tour de force of helpless dread, gore, death, and cannibalism (but if you're here just for the eating people part, after the first chapter we don't really see it in depth until the ~50% mark). Something spine chilling seemed to happen every couple of pages in a way that made the book hard to put down. Even when it frustrated me, the imagery it painted lived behind my eyes when I'd try to sleep at night!

But it misses the mark in a two main ways that stop me from giving it the full five stars. I felt like the book flip flopped on

if something supernatural was happening

in a way that was disappointing to me. Our PoV character is not a reliable narrator, and sometimes when ambiguous "things" are happening, it's all so jumbled up it became more confusing than scary. And in a book where so many characters die, some of the ones who lived felt too unbelievable. It doesn't help that one of those characters is someone I just never understood what on earth their motivation was or why they acted the way they did.

I think I'm going to reread this book at some point in the future, maybe next winter when the winds really being to howl, and reassess how I feel about it.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Death, Gore, Toxic relationship, Violence, Cannibalism, Murder, Toxic friendship, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Homophobia, Misogyny, Racism, Suicide, and Torture

Minor: Animal death, Confinement, Gun violence, Excrement, Vomit, Grief, and Fire/Fire injury

apairofducks's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

This book is absolutely fantastic. I had high hopes after All the White Spaces, and Ally Wilkes more than delivered. The characters were fantastic, the conflicts ached, and the Arctic setting chilled me to the bone despite reading this book in a sweltering July. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death, Emotional abuse, Gore, Toxic relationship, Cannibalism, Murder, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Slavery and Medical content

Minor: Animal death