Reviews with content warning for Physical abuse - Hawk Mountain: A Novel

Reviews tagging 'Physical abuse'

Hawk Mountain: A Novel by Conner Habib

6 reviews

archaicrobin's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Hawk Mountain is one of the most heartbreakingly devastating book I’ve read in a long time. This one was hard to read but I also could not put it down because I had to know how all this tragedy ends. This is not for the faint of heart, it’s horribly sad and incredibly gruesome with visceral descriptions of gore.

If you want an emotional read, with LQBTQ characters, tons of heartache, and gorey imagery, this one is a must be prepared! I heard this one was messed up but I had no idea….. going into this one with little info is best!

Content Warnings

brokenspine's review against another edition

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I see potential in this author. However, there was not a single character that was likable.

Todd was bullied in school and as often happens became a bully. There is child abuse, domestic violence, a lot of homophobia, and it just became exhausting. There is some gore. Unnecessarily so, but nothing I couldn’t handle. And Todd’s unraveling reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tale Tale Heart, but not as engaging.

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theskyboi's review against another edition

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challenging emotional mysterious 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

5.0

I’m grateful to live in a world with so many wonderful options for queer literature, and I’m so honored to call Hawk Mountain one of my absolute favorites! Conner Habib wrote one of the most uniquely gay thrillers, and I can’t sing its praises enough!

This novel follows Todd, whose whole life changes when his high-school bully, Jack, waltzes back into his life seemingly out of thin air. From one moment to the next, Todd is taken from a calm existence as a single father and an English teacher, and he is instead faced with navigating the cryptic air that surrounds Jack.

At the core of this story is the battle between different truths, all with different weights and levels of veracity. Habib’s writing challenges you as a reader to evaluate where you stand, to ask yourself how objective you really can be when navigating life as a human being.

For those who can handle shock and suspense rather well, this book reads like the intersection of the films Parasite and Saltburn, melding the horrors of humanity with the lingering doubts about sweet nothings and what-ifs that seem to define queer youth for those of us from certain generations.

If you’re looking for a book that honors your complexity and intellect as a reader, then please rush to check this one out! The author pulls no punches, making sure to keep you on edge. You’ll never know what lingers in the darkest corners of your memory until you dig deeper and deeper and deeper...

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stwo3389's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

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

3.5

Objectively super well written, just not my cup of tea.

Content Warnings

cannibaldear's review against another edition

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I can handle the gay panic defense and slowly cutting up a corpse piece by piece after killing your childhood bully, but draw the line at child abuse /j

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readundancies's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional tense medium-paced

4.75

I have read exactly one other book that put me in such a tailspin of emotions that Hawk Mountain has left me in. And by tailspin of emotions, I mean specifically those of the uncomfortable kind. The kind that sit heavy at the back of your throat and bleed down your esophagus only to emulsify in your stomach due to the acidity. The kind that are distressing and concerning and make you physically ill because the contents just infect you. The kind that you don’t ever forget.

And this story? This story was all of that. It was dark and isolating and desolate and I really was unnerved by the chilling tone of it all. This was something that I was greatly anticipating and is definitely one of my favourite releases of this year.

So much so that since the copy I initially read was from the library, I had to go above and beyond and make a detour on my way home from some errands today just so I could stop by the bookstore and pick up a physical copy of my own.

For a debut novel, Conner Habib excels at spinning a narrative that is tormentingly cyclical. This was a story where history repeated itself in the most bizarrely destructive and yet beautiful ways; through bullying and gaslighting and child abuse, we as readers get to experience a character in Todd who is both victim and villain. The themes and discourse surrounding sexual identity, parenting, obsession and manipulation were threaded so naturally between Jack and Todd’s shared past in high school and their reunion years later in the present timeline. And I genuinely couldn’t get enough of it. There’s something so fulfilling to me about a tale that focuses on vicious circles; where the tragic nature of comedy is twisted so that a main character can’t help but try to break out of a cycle of struggle, consequences be damned, but all their efforts are futile and they find themselves right back were they started at the beginning. With a different author, I think this story had the potential to become trite where it was grim and exaggerated where it was tense, but Habib managed to create this undercurrent of unease that I couldn’t ignore. I had to pace myself with the first part of this novel because the content became heavy very quickly for me. And yet once the major plot twist came into play, I could not get through the rest of the story fast enough. I was hooked.

And the prose itself was just haunting. Todd was not particularly likeable, but his introspective nature and his traumatic experience in high school set him up to be such a fascinating character. He was incredibly flawed and broken and the worst parts of himself rose to the surface when presented with Jack, the face of his childhood trauma. He was also completely at odds with his sexual identity and some internalized homophobia and it was never explicitly addressed by the end of the story, but all of that was just another strength to me because the story was never supposed to amount to any sort of resolution. And it never does.

Instead, the ending dives into it’s title and absolutely knocks it out of the park because the parallels! It’s taken me a couple of days for it to really sink in but the more I think about it, the more I appreciate the ending and how the pace of this novel was constructed. The full circle moment of what happened on Hawk Mountain and the climax of Jack and Todd’s reunion twenty or so odd years later was just so well executed.

This was by no means a fun read, and definitely has content that will be triggering to many people, especially since there is a fair amount of gore. This is literary noir with a side of horror and a sprinkling of thriller and suspense. It’s got an almost constant psychological manipulation at play and this sense of isolation in both the setting and in Todd that I just couldn’t shake.

And what slightly blows my mind is that I know it in my core that in another universe, this was a romance about first love instead.

Now I don’t think I personally needed Livia’s perspective or Anthony’s to be honest, no matter how brief his was. But I cannot express how much this story has stayed with me and impacted my mood upon finishing it. It’s put me straight into a book hangover and despite me being in a reading funk now, I do not regret it one bit.

So if you’re in the mood for a book that will haunt you long after you finish lingering within it’s pages, do not hesitate to pick this one up. It was darkly disturbing and I mean that as a genuine compliment because it fucked me up good. I will definitely be on the lookout for whatever Conner Habib comes out with next.

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