Reviews

Into the Shadows by Rowan Thalia, Jarica James

narmaeth's review

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3.0

A solid 'meh'.

The premise is fun, I liked the characters. Jun in particular I really liked, she is sex positive and shows real potential to kick ass. The writing is smooth and when I enjoyed it, it felt like time slipped by.

Unfortunately I lost patience with the plot at 70% and fast-skimmed through the rest. Two things were in overabundance and lost its impact each time: the hauntings and the sex scenes.

After a point it felt like the sex scenes were poured in to pad out the story. It didn't add anything to the plot nor did it help to develop the relationships.

With regards to the haunting I'll give this disclaimer; as a mentally ill person I'm also super sick of the 'ghosts from the mental hospital' trope that horror leans heavily on, so this did heavily affect my ability to enjoy the story.

That said, we were given information throughout that wasn't quite contradictory but didn't mesh to give a coherent backstory.

The characters didn't seem to take the occurrences seriously, they'd be given advice on how to deal with it but followed only when it occurred for them to do so. They would be told to contact people for help and completely forget this? Their behaviour gave the impression that they didn't believe that they were in danger, even though they claimed they were scared.

It also suffered from too many chefs in the kitchen thing, with so many different ghosts posing a threat to the characters. It didn't escalate the danger, it just made me lose patience. I think it would have done a lot better to draw out the suspense and focus on just the one antagonist and his victims.
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