Reviews tagging 'Torture'

Hunted by Darcy Coates

5 reviews

lindzboots's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

An excellent thriller! This book read like a slasher film set deep in the green labyrinth of a national orest put on paper. It was well-written and the audiobook reader, Angela Dawe, put on a truly impeccable performance. Written entirely in third person, we got to experience the perspectives of several different characters, and each one had a wonderfully unique voice. It was thrilling, excruciating, gut-wrenching, and terrifying at times. An excellent tale about determination, love, and humanity’s insistence on survival.

Some highlights for me: the eerie atmosphere of the ominous forest really shone through to the point where I was a little spooked reading it at night; being inside Todd’s head was excruciating in its own right and I ate up every second of it; the combinations of spooky forest, cryptid horror, and serial killer slasher hit all the right buttons; and though I’d suspected the answer to the mystery way, way earlier, the end truly surprised and delighted me. 
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cormoranlucreade's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious sad 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? It's complicated

4.25

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funkyartmuffins's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I picked this book up second hand for a couple bucks and I'm sure glad I did! I'm going to look for more books by this author now. It was a really fast read for me and I enjoyed it immensely! It was creepy and exciting. 

I only had a couple of small issues like:

 
Why didn't they look at the negatives? How large were these spools of string? I feel like you need a whole craft store full of string to put as much up as they did.


But it was really fun to read and those are all minor complaints! Can't wait to find more books by this author! 

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omair's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.75

Hunted delivers in bunches what it promises, but does it do so at the cost of having the depth to be truly memorable?

Hunted is an easy read, with short chapters that change scenes at a frantic pace. Mixed with the extremely generic world - more on this in a moment - everything feels foggy or blurry. If this is by design, as I'm choosing to believe to credit author Darcy Coates, then it meets the mood at every turn of the page. If you don't believe this to be intentional, well, then the cracks in the story will likely prove to be too great.

From the first paragraphs, Hunted really imparts a vision of a horror B-movie, something made to be straight to streaming. The character and story tropes are laid on thick
and you realize there's a twist coming that you're not given enough clues to solve with certainty... well, unless you know the tropes already


One of our main POVs
is a group of post-teenagers that truly had me thinking of a knock-off Scooby-Doo quartet, just Shaggy replaced with a stereotypical jock. It doesn't help that they literally get in a van that clinched the Mystery Machine feel to me.


And with that, the mystery is afoot... except that it's not really a mystery at all. Pay just a bit of attention, and you quickly
begin to expect a masked villain at play.
Coates keeps the shrouded sense of it all pretty well though, and the story is never so dull that you're tempted to put it down and walk away.

But what it does lack is anything to really draw you in, to get lost amidst the details or to feel transported into its world. Nothing feels particularly vibrant or lived in. Frankly, I found myself questioning when and where the story takes place. It may as well be set in an alternate USA where they did adopt the metric system and Zuckerberg's rise stalled well into the 2010's.

In the end, I did not hate reading it, nor did I particularly enjoy it, but - most telling for me - I'm not even sure I'll remember having done so a month from now. As such, it's hard for me to recommend this to others, but maybe it'll be a guilty pleasure read for you. I finished it over the course of two nights, so could be worth for anyone wanting to sneak in a title while waiting for a hold on something else.
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witchy_reads's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional inspiring mysterious reflective tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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