samerulesapply's review against another edition
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
the_weirdling's review against another edition
4.0
This is an excellent books which is slightly misleading in the way it is packages, marketed, and presented. Based on the jacket, marketing, and first few chapters, most readers will expect to be settling in to a sort of murder mystery which we will be solved by the somewhat burnt out wolf expert, Russell Core. There is a murder. There is also a bit of a mystery as to how the murders came about. To be sure, the early chapters of the book have all the feel of being the opening salvo of some sort of not-your-usual-type-of-sleuth-mystery series, sure to contain 20-30 pulpy installments. The action, however, shifts away from Core early on. Instead, you are lead on a journey that takes you into the deepest darknesses that hide in the human mind. The book has far more in common with Heart of Darkness or Lord of the Flies than any formulaic, paint-by-numbers murder mystery. I won't go into the details on this one, except to say this: it is dark as hell, and you will be left with the conviction that when human beings break, we break badly.
There is very little I have to add that hasn't already been expressed by the other reviewers. I only which to add my own voice to the chorus of others who have said that this book is beautiful written. It is such a great juxtapositioning and adds to the overall feel. William Giraldi writes about utterly horrible things in a sublimely beautiful way, and it bugged me the whole way through the book, in all the right ways.
A great book, even if its not what I and many others expected.
There is very little I have to add that hasn't already been expressed by the other reviewers. I only which to add my own voice to the chorus of others who have said that this book is beautiful written. It is such a great juxtapositioning and adds to the overall feel. William Giraldi writes about utterly horrible things in a sublimely beautiful way, and it bugged me the whole way through the book, in all the right ways.
A great book, even if its not what I and many others expected.
jpc33's review against another edition
challenging
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
bramish's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
spookynerd13's review against another edition
4.0
3.5 stars... disturbing, haunting, super atmospheric!
anti_formalist12's review against another edition
4.0
A dark fable about men and women on the fringes of society.
kitvaria_sarene's review against another edition
2.0
This is a really disturbing book.
It was not at all what I expected - and not in a good way.
The blurb let me think it was about a pack of wolves taking children - and a wolf expert who looks into things. I did expect it to be grim and bloody, but not the way it was.
First of, the wolves had hardly a big part - they felt more like the backdrop in a theater.
Then the characters were just so unbelievable and unlikable. All of them. Instead of a "sciency" thriller about wolves I got to read about disturning, sick people. I get that humans are the bigger monsters than wolves. I get that there is "a wolf" in us all. But that was just over the top - and felt like gore for the sake of it - and it didn't look like a "Layman" book....
Synopsis and why I thought it just so bad:
His friend kills more than 10 people with a machine gun, untill he himself is killed - without any understandable reason, besides describing the gore in detail.
When the husband finally finds his sister - he has sex with the woman who murdered his son, and flees with her into the tundra, where they live in an old hunting iglo their father had built years back, where they live "happily ever after" with her being pregnant again (sure, this time it will work out better - away from civilization...), and the whole village helps them, by not speaking with the police, letting the body of an old lady who fell victim to the husband dissappear and bringing them tools to build a new, bigger iglo.
BTW - the wolves are almost starved - that's why they took those two children who vanished first - but the husband of course finds enough food to feed them through the last month(s) of winter, with the supplies left in the iglo years before, and a pack or two left by their mother and what he can hunt....
I have no idea what the point of the book should be, or how I should feel now - really I just think "Okaaayyyyy...?" and that's that.
One star for Alaska and the descriptions of the cold, the snow and how to live there.
Otherwise the only good thing I could find was that is really short....
It was not at all what I expected - and not in a good way.
The blurb let me think it was about a pack of wolves taking children - and a wolf expert who looks into things. I did expect it to be grim and bloody, but not the way it was.
First of, the wolves had hardly a big part - they felt more like the backdrop in a theater.
Then the characters were just so unbelievable and unlikable. All of them. Instead of a "sciency" thriller about wolves I got to read about disturning, sick people. I get that humans are the bigger monsters than wolves. I get that there is "a wolf" in us all. But that was just over the top - and felt like gore for the sake of it - and it didn't look like a "Layman" book....
Synopsis and why I thought it just so bad:
Spoiler
The woman who murdered her child is the sister of her husband, who comes home from war and goes on a killing spree looking for her. He wants to find her first - and in order to do that he kills whomever gets in the way -including two police officers. (That would not bring way more police down onto their track surely...)His friend kills more than 10 people with a machine gun, untill he himself is killed - without any understandable reason, besides describing the gore in detail.
When the husband finally finds his sister - he has sex with the woman who murdered his son, and flees with her into the tundra, where they live in an old hunting iglo their father had built years back, where they live "happily ever after" with her being pregnant again (sure, this time it will work out better - away from civilization...), and the whole village helps them, by not speaking with the police, letting the body of an old lady who fell victim to the husband dissappear and bringing them tools to build a new, bigger iglo.
BTW - the wolves are almost starved - that's why they took those two children who vanished first - but the husband of course finds enough food to feed them through the last month(s) of winter, with the supplies left in the iglo years before, and a pack or two left by their mother and what he can hunt....
I have no idea what the point of the book should be, or how I should feel now - really I just think "Okaaayyyyy...?" and that's that.
One star for Alaska and the descriptions of the cold, the snow and how to live there.
Otherwise the only good thing I could find was that is really short....
birdkeeperklink's review against another edition
1.0
Hoo, boy. I did not like this book at all, and I had many reasons. Yo ready for this? Then throw on some Tag Team and let's do this thing.
I'm not going to list each reason out individually like a bullet list this time, I'm just going to go with it, and hopefully it will make enough sense to be readable. A brief summary: a woman named Medora Slone supposedly loses her son, the third in the village to be taken by wolves, so she writes to Russell Core, a wolf expert who shot one once and spent the rest of his life feeling guilty over it, and invites him to come and try to find and kill the wolf that did it. He comes, but he's not really sure why, since he doesn't want to kill any wolves, and he's also vaguely suicidal and no one cares, including the long-suffering reader. Only, her son wasn't taken by wolves like the other two kids, she killed him and wrapped him in cellophane and put him in the root cellar (finding this out was when I began to be disappointed in this book, and I'll explain why in a moment). She takes off while Core is out looking for but not killing the wolves, who really did take the other two kids because there's a famine and they're starving and stuff. Core comes back, finds the dead kid's body, and alerts everyone and the cops come and don't really do anything useful other than wonder why Core is there. Then Vernon Slone, Medora's husband, who's been away at war and murdering people (which we find out mostly in flashbacks, showing us that he's probably got PTSD, except not, because he totally murdered somebody before he ever went away to war, in a completely unnecessarily violent way, and he probably should've called the cops instead of straight-up murdering the dude, but whatever. That's a pattern in this book--needless massacre), comes back and starts killing everybody (except Core) and looking for his wife/twin sister. Yeah. At the end, he finds her, shoots but doesn't kill Core, has sex with her right in front of him, and they disappear into the wild to live happily-ish ever after.
That summary probably put you off quite a bit, didn't it? Well, that's because it's my (honest) summary, and not the summary that came with the book. See, I was under the impression that I was reading about wolves eating people because of a famine, and people having to come to terms with their own involvement in nature's problems, their grief and desire for revenge against animals who are simply obeying instinct and hunger, and you know, other things of that nature that are introspective and actually happen and make sense. Silly me. Don't know what I could've been thinking of. You know what's way better than making sense and having a point? Gratuitous incest!!!
Yeah, see, Vernon and Medora are actually twin brother and sister as well as husband and wife, and that's supposed to be the amazing, horrifying twist that makes it all make sense, except that it wasn't a twist because I figured it out pretty quickly--way before the climax--and it didn't make it make sense. Nothing could make this stupid story make sense. Sure, I get it, postpartum depression and the instinct against incest made Medora kill their son. Except, if she is instinctively that opposed to it, why did she go along with marrying her brother in the first place? And why, in the end, when she thinks about killing him and has the knife in her hand and everything, did she not go ahead and do it, freeing her from him?
And where in the world were the parents?? Yeah, we're told that their father shot himself around the time she was pregnant with Bailey (their son), and that he tried to cure Vernon's 'unnatural ways' with wolf oil when he was five or six, but seriously? Why didn't he just grab one of the kids and take off for parts unknown? If they were separated (since that was apparently the only way to keep them from taking naked walks and rolling around naked together even at that young age), then they can't marry each other. Boom! Problem solved. And why does the mother (and most of the rest of the village, I might add) seem to approve of this disgusting union? It just doesn't make any sense.
Particularly since Vernon seems to have been born messed up. I might have excused him snapping, upon learning that his son had been killed by his wife/sister, if it had just been PTSD, but the dropped hints that he was considered 'unnatural' even as a little boy, the story about him killing a wolf just for fun, his brutal murder of the drifter guy before he ever went to war, these things seem to point to his being born a sociopath. That makes his actions stupid and nonsensical--he should have been calculating, and he wasn't. He wasn't a grief-stricken, traumatized soldier who was lashing out at the world, yet he wasn't really a sociopath, either. He doesn't seem to have any real motives, and he never becomes anything more than a mystery to the reader. I suppose this was meant to make him seem like a force of nature (like a wolf, get it, har har har, except wolves still have motives even if people don't always understand them), but it didn't, it just made him seem like a one-dimensional character who was only there to make Plot happen.
Seriously, let's just look at his initial murder of the two cops--it just comes out of nowhere. We're standing around talking, and suddenly there's just casual description of how he shot one in the face and the other in the forehead, and then shot them again for good measure, just like we're describing someone getting groceries. What? Okay, so later, a character claims he killed them to keep the cops from finding his wife first--but then Vernon thinks to himself that they'd never find her anyway because the two of them know paths that none of the town cops would know. So...that makes their deaths unnecessary, right? If you want to avoid police attention and take care of something yourself, vigilante-style, generally the best way to do that is to not murder any cops. If he'd just gone home, they probably would have looked for her in Canada and not paid him any more attention, and he would have been free to go murd--I mean, have sex with her, since once he finds her, you're expecting retribution and murder and stuff, since he's cold-bloodedly killed a bunch of different people at this point just for, I don't know, talking to her, but instead he just grabs her by the throat, slams her against the floor, and then starts making out with her and eventually has sex with her. Again--what?
But like I said, there's plenty of one-dimensional not-making-sense to go around. Cheeon, when the cops come to talk to him about the fact that the two cops were murdered with a gun matching the type of one he has registered and Vernon has disappeared, decides to bitch about how there's a famine and no jobs, and apparently this is somehow the police's fault, and how the wolves took his daughter and he doesn't think the cops cared, I guess just because they didn't go murder every wolf in the area? Anyway, then he goes upstairs and starts taking them all out with a machine gun, with lots and lots of gory description, until Marium, the main cop character, sneaks into the house and kills him. I didn't know Cheeon, and one conversation didn't give me insight into why all this happened, so other than taking up space, none of that really had a point.
Not even the good guys are likable or relatable at all. Marium is your generic cop character with a baby on the way (so you can guess what happens to him), and Core is...nearly suicidally depressed? It seems to be his only character trait. I'd tell you not to get attached to anyone, since they're all fair game (except Core, who is the Reader Avatar), but there's no fear of that.
It doesn't help the characters at all that the dialogue is all stilted and unnatural. This is not how people talk, not at all. Even in crappy cop shows they talk more naturally than this. I might have been able to handle it if it had been a quirk of one character to talk like this, but it isn't--they all repeat themselves, they're all vague and speak in riddles, they all repeat what someone else just said to them, and they all offer up stories that seem to come out of nowhere and are only barely related to what's going on, much to the mystification of the reader and the other character, neither of whom asked for this story or understand why it's being told at this particular moment.
That leads me to another point--this book couldn't seem to decide, at first, if it was going to go the scientific route or the mystical one, but it pretty quickly dove nose-first into the mystical one, and I just couldn't get behind that. I don't believe people's fates are written in ice--I don't believe that vagrant guys can just show up and tell you that your child is cursed and must not be born, without ever having met you or anyone you know--I don't believe in the Sasquatch or wolf demons or curses. I don't believe in 'otherness.' I believe Alaska is freaking Alaska and makes perfect sense. I also don't believe people are born so 'unnatural' as part of a 'curse' that they decide to marry their sisters and gruesomely murder other people with little provocation.
See, reality is allowed to not make sense like that. When a man in real life walks into a school or a theater or a mall and just starts shooting everyone, it's tragic and it generally doesn't make sense to anyone and it leaves everyone bewildered and reeling and afraid and horribly, horribly sad. When it happens in fiction, the reader knows that the author is the one causing this to happen--not fate, not an unstable person who wouldn't or couldn't find help--no, it's the author doing this, and that's why it has to make sense. Fiction isn't allowed to be as strange as reality, largely because making things happen for no reason just smacks of lazy writing and makes the reader angry. None of the events of this book touched me at all, other than to greatly irritate me, because there was no attempt made at logic or characterization. Things...simply happened, and the characters were simply there to make them happen. They had no life of their own.
The book was also gross in all the wrong ways. Since I was expecting a book about wolves eating people, I was expecting the gory stuff. I was not expecting the gross sex stuff, which happened entirely too often for my liking. When Core shows up, Medora comes to him naked in the night and puts his hand on her privates for...reasons? When Vernon is searching for Medora, he finds her, ahem, fluids on the sheets at the motel she stayed in, and he masturbates, which also doesn't make sense because she killed his son. That...really, really shouldn't make you want to masturbate. There's almost loving description of some guy picking his nose and eating it, and for some reason, the author felt it necessary to have Core shave his entire body, and dedicates several sentences in each scene afterward to drawing your attention to the fact that he's all shaved under his clothes. There was also a lot of awkward sniffing of clothing and stuff. Seriously, authors of the world, WOLVES ARE NOT PEOPLE, PEOPLE ARE NOT WOLVES. I realize the symbolism is irresistible to some, but get over it. Yes, wolves are cool, and we humans can be a lot more animalistic than we realize, but we're not actually wolves. Can it, authors. Find some new symbolism.
The worst part of it all is that you force your way through, you drag yourself through the mire of this book, and it was all for naught. 'Unnatural ways,' 'a curse,' 'wolf demons,' and 'otherness' are all the explanation you're ever going to get, and apparently you're supposed to be...I don't know what reaction the author was going for, honestly. Really, this book actually had potential--if you removed the incest subplot and the attempts at mysticism and the many, many, many unnecessary, unhelpful and irrelevant mentions of wolves, and made it instead a book about a woman overcome with loneliness and postpartum depression in the far reaches of Alaska, and then added in her husband snapping after facing a war that left him traumatized and coming home to find out that his wife murdered his son while he was gone, then it might have been interesting. I'd read that book, tragic though it would be.
I already mentioned that the dialogue wasn't very good--well, sad to say, the prose wasn't very good, either. Half the time it was delivered in sentence fragments that were apparently supposed to make you feel as though what was being said was Very Important, and the other half it was so purple I could have gagged. The author had two or three turns of phrase that I mildly enjoyed, but the rest of the time...it could've been taken down a few notches.
Even if you put aside all of its other flaws, if you assume I'm being picky or whatever, it's just a thoroughly unpleasant book filled with thoroughly unpleasant people that wound up to nothing. I found it a needlessly grim, miserable book (everything in it seemed to scream dark and edgy!!), and it was pointless to boot. I think it goes without saying that I wouldn't recommend this to anyone.
I'm not going to list each reason out individually like a bullet list this time, I'm just going to go with it, and hopefully it will make enough sense to be readable. A brief summary: a woman named Medora Slone supposedly loses her son, the third in the village to be taken by wolves, so she writes to Russell Core, a wolf expert who shot one once and spent the rest of his life feeling guilty over it, and invites him to come and try to find and kill the wolf that did it. He comes, but he's not really sure why, since he doesn't want to kill any wolves, and he's also vaguely suicidal and no one cares, including the long-suffering reader. Only, her son wasn't taken by wolves like the other two kids, she killed him and wrapped him in cellophane and put him in the root cellar (finding this out was when I began to be disappointed in this book, and I'll explain why in a moment). She takes off while Core is out looking for but not killing the wolves, who really did take the other two kids because there's a famine and they're starving and stuff. Core comes back, finds the dead kid's body, and alerts everyone and the cops come and don't really do anything useful other than wonder why Core is there. Then Vernon Slone, Medora's husband, who's been away at war and murdering people (which we find out mostly in flashbacks, showing us that he's probably got PTSD, except not, because he totally murdered somebody before he ever went away to war, in a completely unnecessarily violent way, and he probably should've called the cops instead of straight-up murdering the dude, but whatever. That's a pattern in this book--needless massacre), comes back and starts killing everybody (except Core) and looking for his wife/twin sister. Yeah. At the end, he finds her, shoots but doesn't kill Core, has sex with her right in front of him, and they disappear into the wild to live happily-ish ever after.
That summary probably put you off quite a bit, didn't it? Well, that's because it's my (honest) summary, and not the summary that came with the book. See, I was under the impression that I was reading about wolves eating people because of a famine, and people having to come to terms with their own involvement in nature's problems, their grief and desire for revenge against animals who are simply obeying instinct and hunger, and you know, other things of that nature that are introspective and actually happen and make sense. Silly me. Don't know what I could've been thinking of. You know what's way better than making sense and having a point? Gratuitous incest!!!
Yeah, see, Vernon and Medora are actually twin brother and sister as well as husband and wife, and that's supposed to be the amazing, horrifying twist that makes it all make sense, except that it wasn't a twist because I figured it out pretty quickly--way before the climax--and it didn't make it make sense. Nothing could make this stupid story make sense. Sure, I get it, postpartum depression and the instinct against incest made Medora kill their son. Except, if she is instinctively that opposed to it, why did she go along with marrying her brother in the first place? And why, in the end, when she thinks about killing him and has the knife in her hand and everything, did she not go ahead and do it, freeing her from him?
And where in the world were the parents?? Yeah, we're told that their father shot himself around the time she was pregnant with Bailey (their son), and that he tried to cure Vernon's 'unnatural ways' with wolf oil when he was five or six, but seriously? Why didn't he just grab one of the kids and take off for parts unknown? If they were separated (since that was apparently the only way to keep them from taking naked walks and rolling around naked together even at that young age), then they can't marry each other. Boom! Problem solved. And why does the mother (and most of the rest of the village, I might add) seem to approve of this disgusting union? It just doesn't make any sense.
Particularly since Vernon seems to have been born messed up. I might have excused him snapping, upon learning that his son had been killed by his wife/sister, if it had just been PTSD, but the dropped hints that he was considered 'unnatural' even as a little boy, the story about him killing a wolf just for fun, his brutal murder of the drifter guy before he ever went to war, these things seem to point to his being born a sociopath. That makes his actions stupid and nonsensical--he should have been calculating, and he wasn't. He wasn't a grief-stricken, traumatized soldier who was lashing out at the world, yet he wasn't really a sociopath, either. He doesn't seem to have any real motives, and he never becomes anything more than a mystery to the reader. I suppose this was meant to make him seem like a force of nature (like a wolf, get it, har har har, except wolves still have motives even if people don't always understand them), but it didn't, it just made him seem like a one-dimensional character who was only there to make Plot happen.
Seriously, let's just look at his initial murder of the two cops--it just comes out of nowhere. We're standing around talking, and suddenly there's just casual description of how he shot one in the face and the other in the forehead, and then shot them again for good measure, just like we're describing someone getting groceries. What? Okay, so later, a character claims he killed them to keep the cops from finding his wife first--but then Vernon thinks to himself that they'd never find her anyway because the two of them know paths that none of the town cops would know. So...that makes their deaths unnecessary, right? If you want to avoid police attention and take care of something yourself, vigilante-style, generally the best way to do that is to not murder any cops. If he'd just gone home, they probably would have looked for her in Canada and not paid him any more attention, and he would have been free to go murd--I mean, have sex with her, since once he finds her, you're expecting retribution and murder and stuff, since he's cold-bloodedly killed a bunch of different people at this point just for, I don't know, talking to her, but instead he just grabs her by the throat, slams her against the floor, and then starts making out with her and eventually has sex with her. Again--what?
But like I said, there's plenty of one-dimensional not-making-sense to go around. Cheeon, when the cops come to talk to him about the fact that the two cops were murdered with a gun matching the type of one he has registered and Vernon has disappeared, decides to bitch about how there's a famine and no jobs, and apparently this is somehow the police's fault, and how the wolves took his daughter and he doesn't think the cops cared, I guess just because they didn't go murder every wolf in the area? Anyway, then he goes upstairs and starts taking them all out with a machine gun, with lots and lots of gory description, until Marium, the main cop character, sneaks into the house and kills him. I didn't know Cheeon, and one conversation didn't give me insight into why all this happened, so other than taking up space, none of that really had a point.
Not even the good guys are likable or relatable at all. Marium is your generic cop character with a baby on the way (so you can guess what happens to him), and Core is...nearly suicidally depressed? It seems to be his only character trait. I'd tell you not to get attached to anyone, since they're all fair game (except Core, who is the Reader Avatar), but there's no fear of that.
It doesn't help the characters at all that the dialogue is all stilted and unnatural. This is not how people talk, not at all. Even in crappy cop shows they talk more naturally than this. I might have been able to handle it if it had been a quirk of one character to talk like this, but it isn't--they all repeat themselves, they're all vague and speak in riddles, they all repeat what someone else just said to them, and they all offer up stories that seem to come out of nowhere and are only barely related to what's going on, much to the mystification of the reader and the other character, neither of whom asked for this story or understand why it's being told at this particular moment.
That leads me to another point--this book couldn't seem to decide, at first, if it was going to go the scientific route or the mystical one, but it pretty quickly dove nose-first into the mystical one, and I just couldn't get behind that. I don't believe people's fates are written in ice--I don't believe that vagrant guys can just show up and tell you that your child is cursed and must not be born, without ever having met you or anyone you know--I don't believe in the Sasquatch or wolf demons or curses. I don't believe in 'otherness.' I believe Alaska is freaking Alaska and makes perfect sense. I also don't believe people are born so 'unnatural' as part of a 'curse' that they decide to marry their sisters and gruesomely murder other people with little provocation.
See, reality is allowed to not make sense like that. When a man in real life walks into a school or a theater or a mall and just starts shooting everyone, it's tragic and it generally doesn't make sense to anyone and it leaves everyone bewildered and reeling and afraid and horribly, horribly sad. When it happens in fiction, the reader knows that the author is the one causing this to happen--not fate, not an unstable person who wouldn't or couldn't find help--no, it's the author doing this, and that's why it has to make sense. Fiction isn't allowed to be as strange as reality, largely because making things happen for no reason just smacks of lazy writing and makes the reader angry. None of the events of this book touched me at all, other than to greatly irritate me, because there was no attempt made at logic or characterization. Things...simply happened, and the characters were simply there to make them happen. They had no life of their own.
The book was also gross in all the wrong ways. Since I was expecting a book about wolves eating people, I was expecting the gory stuff. I was not expecting the gross sex stuff, which happened entirely too often for my liking. When Core shows up, Medora comes to him naked in the night and puts his hand on her privates for...reasons? When Vernon is searching for Medora, he finds her, ahem, fluids on the sheets at the motel she stayed in, and he masturbates, which also doesn't make sense because she killed his son. That...really, really shouldn't make you want to masturbate. There's almost loving description of some guy picking his nose and eating it, and for some reason, the author felt it necessary to have Core shave his entire body, and dedicates several sentences in each scene afterward to drawing your attention to the fact that he's all shaved under his clothes. There was also a lot of awkward sniffing of clothing and stuff. Seriously, authors of the world, WOLVES ARE NOT PEOPLE, PEOPLE ARE NOT WOLVES. I realize the symbolism is irresistible to some, but get over it. Yes, wolves are cool, and we humans can be a lot more animalistic than we realize, but we're not actually wolves. Can it, authors. Find some new symbolism.
The worst part of it all is that you force your way through, you drag yourself through the mire of this book, and it was all for naught. 'Unnatural ways,' 'a curse,' 'wolf demons,' and 'otherness' are all the explanation you're ever going to get, and apparently you're supposed to be...I don't know what reaction the author was going for, honestly. Really, this book actually had potential--if you removed the incest subplot and the attempts at mysticism and the many, many, many unnecessary, unhelpful and irrelevant mentions of wolves, and made it instead a book about a woman overcome with loneliness and postpartum depression in the far reaches of Alaska, and then added in her husband snapping after facing a war that left him traumatized and coming home to find out that his wife murdered his son while he was gone, then it might have been interesting. I'd read that book, tragic though it would be.
I already mentioned that the dialogue wasn't very good--well, sad to say, the prose wasn't very good, either. Half the time it was delivered in sentence fragments that were apparently supposed to make you feel as though what was being said was Very Important, and the other half it was so purple I could have gagged. The author had two or three turns of phrase that I mildly enjoyed, but the rest of the time...it could've been taken down a few notches.
Even if you put aside all of its other flaws, if you assume I'm being picky or whatever, it's just a thoroughly unpleasant book filled with thoroughly unpleasant people that wound up to nothing. I found it a needlessly grim, miserable book (everything in it seemed to scream dark and edgy!!), and it was pointless to boot. I think it goes without saying that I wouldn't recommend this to anyone.
yeahnaar's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
This book is somewhat engaging, but is much more exciting in theory than practice. It’s far too self aware, and also leans on problematic tropes of indigenous mysticism for horror. Still, it’s a page turner at times