verkisto's review
3.0
I was all set to give this book four stars (well, 3.5, rounded up) because Jensen does such a good job of building suspense and actually creating a good sense of fear in the story. The story has some "product of its time" problems, like some homophobia and sexism, characters coming in only long enough to serve as victims, and exposition that has as much subtlety as a hammer to an egg (when new characters enter the story, they'll tell you their life stories in a couple of paragraphs), but that story zings.
The problem is the ending. We get 319 pages of build-up, 319 pages of wondering how the characters are going to defeat the creature, 319 pages of superb tension, but then less than one page of conclusion. It happens so quickly (and, honestly, so easy) that it's hard not to want to write your own ending to the book. At the very least, you'll want an epilogue, where the author tells us how these events affected everyone touched by the story. Unless I got a copy that's missing the last section, it's not there.
Still, this is a book that shows why Jensen is still considered to be a master of horror. Interestingly, she's known as an author who used the cursed-baby trope for almost all of her works, but it's absent here. I'm not sure if that makes it a novelty in her catalog.
The problem is the ending. We get 319 pages of build-up, 319 pages of wondering how the characters are going to defeat the creature, 319 pages of superb tension, but then less than one page of conclusion. It happens so quickly (and, honestly, so easy) that it's hard not to want to write your own ending to the book. At the very least, you'll want an epilogue, where the author tells us how these events affected everyone touched by the story. Unless I got a copy that's missing the last section, it's not there.
Still, this is a book that shows why Jensen is still considered to be a master of horror. Interestingly, she's known as an author who used the cursed-baby trope for almost all of her works, but it's absent here. I'm not sure if that makes it a novelty in her catalog.
More...