Blog Tour: Review of Pavlov's Dogs by D.L. Snell & Thom Brannan

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Information:

Title: Pavlov’s Dogs

Author: D.L. Snell & Thom Brannan

Publisher: Permuted Press

Target Audience: Adult

Genre: Horror

Length: 281 pages

Story: WEREWOLVES

Dr. Crispin has engineered the saviors of mankind: Pavlov’s Dogs, a team of soldiers capable of transforming into fearsome beasts. But when Crispin and his team welcome a new talented neurotechnician to the island, Dr. Crispin quickly realizes his masterwork has fallen into the hands of a man he does not trust.

ZOMBIES

Back on the mainland, Ken Bishop and his best friend Jorge get caught in a traffic jam on their way home from work. There’s a wreck up ahead. And something worse. The first sign of a major outbreak—and Ken and Jorge are stuck in the gridlock. They quickly realize that they not only need to escape, but they also need to save as many people as possible on the way.

ARMAGEDDON

Now Dr. Crispin and his team must make a terrible decision. Should they send the Dogs out into the zombie apocalypse to rescue survivors? Or should they listen to the new neurotechnician, who would have them hoard their resources and post the Dogs as island guards?

Thoughts and impressions: Though I watch a fair few horror films, it’s actually fairly rare that I will read horror stories aimed at the adult market. I tried Stephen King’s Pet Sematary once and ended up having nightmares about dead things rising from the grave. Not fun. I stopped part way through and haven’t touched another King novel since (though I have watched most of the films based on his books and those never give me nightmares!). This experience taught me something very important: do not treat horror as bedtime reading. My overactive imagination does not appreciate it. I learnt my lesson and, thankfully, kept it in mind with this one.

Pavlov’s Dogs doesn’t quite get like Pet Sematary. It reads like the literary version of one of those horror movies from the 80s that were pretty much just making fun of themselves. Think those old movies with incredibly unrealistic zombies shuffling around groaning about brainssssss. Kind of like that in that there was certainly a lot of tension and the worry of how survival can be ensured, but it doesn't take itself too seriously. Trust me, this can definitely be a good thing!

The book is at times quite clearly a portrait of society. Then again, don’t most zombie tales draw lines between the good of the individual and the good of the group? Each time there’s the question of whether to help others at the potential expense of risking your own life. As humans, I think we’re often torn between the two as our morals tell us we should help but our survival instinct screams that it’s in our better interests not to.

So the zombies are the kind we all know already. There’s a bus crash and those who were dead start to stand up again and attack the living. It only takes a small flesh wound to turn a living person into the living dead and we follow a group of survivors desperately trying to do just that – survive. At the same time we also follow a group of scientists on an isolated. As such, they’re not at risk of being overrun by the zombie hordes. Even better, they have their own secret weapon: military men genetically engineered to be able to shift into dogs. These are the people who are faced with the choice of sending out their secret weapon to help save those they can, or better ensure their own survival by ignoring their plight. I found the Dogs to be original in a market where there are countless books about werewolves out there. Zombies versus werewolves? Oh yeah, fun in the making!

I did have a couple of problems as well, though. My main problem with the book was all the names. There are a lot of characters and they all get named. I just couldn’t hold on to that many names in my head and keep being able to associate that name with that character, especially when most of them are just secondary characters. It just resulted in me getting confused and having to stop every so often to try to figure out just who X was happening to.

Overall, though, I enjoyed the book a lot! It was outside of my normal comfort zone but just reading it you could tell that the authors had a great time collaborating on this novel. It always shows when the authors really enjoyed writing and it’s very obvious that this is the case here.

Style: I don’t really have much to say about the style. It suited the voice of the story very well, easily creating tension but also sometimes providing a needed laugh. At the start of the book there was a “voila” that turned out to be a “viola” (spelling mistake) and that made me laugh!

Final verdict: It was good! I enjoyed myself running from the zombie hordes with these people. 4 stars

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

I bought this book a long time ago – well, it can only have been four years ago at most but it feels like I made the purchase a long time ago. A friend recommended Gaiman to me, this book in particular. I listened to them in so much as I bought the book but whenever I sat in front of my bookcase looking for my next read it just never caught my eye until now.

Well, as they say, better late than never!

Information:

Title: The Graveyard Book

Author: Neil Gaiman

Publisher: HarperCollins

Target Audience: Children’s / YA / Adult???

Pages: 307

Chapters: 8

PoV: 3^rd person

Tense : Past tense

Story: After the grisly murder of his entire family, a toddler wanders into a graveyard where the ghosts and other supernatural residents agree to raise him as one of their own. 

Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead. There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will come under attack from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod's family . . . 

Beloved master storyteller Neil Gaiman returns with a luminous new novel for the audience that embraced his New York Times bestselling modern classic Coraline. Magical, terrifying, and filled with breathtaking adventures, The Graveyard Book is sure to enthrall readers of all ages.

(from Goodreads)

Thoughts and impressions: My first thought upon starting this book was that the style was very singular. The opening scene is of a man wiping blood from the knife he’s just used to kill three people but the language used almost makes it sound as though the story is aimed at a younger readership.

The style continues in this same manner but the events described are sometimes quite complex. The reader is only given part of the information and left to draw their own conclusions. I’m not sure that some of what’s going on wouldn’t just go over the heads of much younger readers. That said, the content is not particularly scary – I’ve read scarier books aimed at ten-year-olds – as you might imagine from the title, the synopsis, the knowledge that a man wants to kill the main character and the fact that it all takes place in a graveyard. I found it difficult to place the target audience with this one. Whenever I see the book in the shops, it’s always in the adult section but I think the story would appeal to younger readers too.

Each chapter follows a certain even in Bod’s life and each time these events take place two years apart. For the most part, the stories aren’t particularly interconnected but they show Bod’s evolution from a toddler to a young man. In each the reader is invited to explore an area of a reality that exists alongside ours – whether this be a trip along a plane where the “ghouls” live or an encounter with a millennia-old power.

I enjoyed each and every one of the short stories from Bod’s life, though at 80+ pages the 7^th was a bit of a push (I like to read chapter by chapter and not stop in the middle of one if at all possible). My favourite story was when Bod meets the ghost of a young woman who was burnt as a witch and buried on unconsecrated ground. She, Liza, has no headstones and this makes her sad so a young Bod decides to go out into the big wide world and buy one for her. I found this really sweet, especially as he’s only eight at the time.

Of course, the recurring theme across the novel is Bod’s existence in the graveyard living with the dead in a world apart from the living. Sometimes this is hard for him as he fights the urge to socialise with others like him – especially as he gets older. His struggles were always worthy of a child at whatever age he is in the chapter, though his speech did seem a bit formal. This could be put down to his having effectively been brought up by people who died anything between a hundred and just under two thousand years ago.

At one point, I thought it might turn out that “the man Jack” was some form of Jack the Ripper, what with his blade and all that. I’ve read a few novels over the past few months that incorporated Jack the Ripper in some way and I have to say that I’m glad that this book did not go down that same road. The idea of the Jacks of all trades really intrigued me; it was certainly something very different though I would have liked to have learnt more about them.

In all, this is a fairly short book. I read it in an afternoon. Dave McKean’s illustrations really serve to set it apart from the norm and I’m sure that they will make the book appeal all the more to certain readers. I have to admit that once or twice I couldn’t work out just what was being illustrated, though!

Style: The style was fairly simple, which was what led me to speculate about just what age of reader this book is aimed at. It’s one that a ten-year-old could likely tackle on their own, but it also hides more advanced hidden ideas.

Final verdict: As mentioned, this was my first Gaiman read. While I enjoyed it, I’m not chomping at the bit to go and read more by him. At times I wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue reading or take a short break from the book. I might have enjoyed it more had I taken my time with it but instead I pushed through it all. This meant that I did occasionally feel worn down by the book. I’d advise other readers to not do as I did and to go at the pace their minds dictate. Maybe the book will earn a full 5 stars from these people but it gets a still good 4 stars from me.

Extra notes: I don’t think there was any bad language. No sex.

The Other Life by Susanne Winnacker

I don’t remember how I came across this book but it came onto my radar at some point late last year and I soon put it on pre-order. If I’m honest, I think I was probably attracted to the cover more than the description in this case. I say this because it was only after I’d ordered it that I read a review mentioning zombies and I reacted with a moment of pure horror. The trauma of The Forest of Hands and Teeth apparently lingers on. Of course, if you actually pay attention to the synopsis, it’s fairly obvious that there’s going to be some sort of mutant creature involved. So I put my YA zombie prejudices to one side, picked up the book and hoped for the best.

Informtation:

Title: The Other Side

Series: The Other Life #1

Author: Susanne Winnacker

Publisher: Usborne

Target Audience: YA

Pages: 320

PoV: 1^st person

Tense: Past tense

Story: 3 years, 1 month, 1 week and 6 days since I’d seen daylight. One-fifth of my life. 98,409,602 seconds since the heavy, steel door had fallen shut and sealed us off from the world 

Sherry has lived with her family in a sealed bunker since things went wrong up above. But when they run out of food, Sherry and her dad must venture outside. There they find a world of devastation, desolation...and the Weepers: savage, mutant killers. 

When Sherry's dad is snatched, she joins forces with gorgeous but troubled Joshua - an Avenger, determined to destroy the Weepers. 

But can Sherry keep her family and Joshua safe, when his desire for vengeance threatens them all?

(from Goodreads)

Thoughts and impressions: First of all, this book is vastly superior to the story in The Forest of Hands and Teeth, at least for me. TFoHaT scarred me, this one entertained me. I didn’t want to cause anyone bodily harm when I finished this book – yey! However, that does not mean that it’s great.

I liked the idea of what the Weepers are (the Weepers being the transformed humans who hunt other humans to eat their flesh). I liked that there were some that were more animal than human but others that had retained their intelligence. I liked that they were still reminiscent of typical zombies with their flesh falling off. I really liked the conspiracy theory introduced, though unfortunately it was only introduced at the end and didn’t receive much attention as the author set the scene for the second book, which will (I suspect) look into it more. This said, I’m not entirely sure that this book was the time to introduce that. It felt a bit rushed and it was a completely different note to everything that had come before.

I also liked how Winnacker took the time to set the scene of how her world ended up the way it did. Usually in dystopians, the author just presents the broken world and the reader has no choice but to go with the flow. In The Other Life, the protagonist, Sherry, lived through the breakdown of her society so the reader is also aware of what went wrong where and why, what role those in power played in it all, and what the results of the decisions made are for the survivors. Before each chapter, there is a short excerpt of a scene in Sherry’s life before things went wrong. These provided a contrast with the bleak present that Sherry finds herself in and I thought that these were a really engaging touch.

The relationship between Joshua and Sherry is not rushed or diminished by claims of undying love between the two. The start of it seemed a bit advanced but to say that they’d just met but this can be justified by the very different world and the fact that Joshua had just saved Sherry’s life. It becomes calmer after that and is allowed to evolve at a very natural pace, which is something that I really appreciate in books. The novel is written in Sherry’s voice and she admits that she’s unsure of what goes on in Joshua’s head – considering his past and how he put her in danger a couple of times because of his drive to hunt the hunters, I can understand her reluctance that shadows her attraction to him.

My main gripe with the book is that it felt rather… I’m not sure of the word for it. It’s very short and I felt as though I didn’t really get the full story I wished for. I really enjoyed what I got but I felt that it focused a lot on the action to the detriment of the character development. I wanted to get to know all of the characters better. Rachel, in particular, is named as being one of the characters that will be central in the next book and I’m not entirely sure whether she even gets one line of dialogue in this book. She’s just a presence. I have no idea who she is or what her history is.

A few times, Sherry mentions how many seconds it’s been since event X happened. I’m not entirely sure that I bought that. Either she’s incredibly good at maths or it’s too forced. I could never work out how many seconds it’s been since I did X, Y or Z off the top of my head. It was an interesting touch but it was overused and lost its impact as numbers were rattled off for various things on a fairly frequent basis.

Finally, Sherry mentions that her grandma never stops knitting and has not run out of wool in all the time since they went underground. I’m not entirely sure the author realises how much wool can be used while knitting. I can easily get through a 100g ball in 5 hours, and I’m not that fast at knitting so grandma would be getting through at least 2 balls a day. I highly doubt that they will have taken so much wool with them (if grandma got through two 100g balls a day she would have used up 2278 balls by the day they run out of food and Sherry mentions that she still has a lot of wool to get through). But maybe I’m nit-picking here.

The idea behind the story is really inspired and has an awful lot of promise. The hints of what’s to come in the second book are tantalising. I feel like the book could have been better but I still enjoyed it for what it was. It has restored some of my faith in YA zombie books!

Style: Fairly simple but very engaging. I finished the book in only a couple of hours and part of that was due to how drawn in I was by the style.

Final verdict: I really enjoyed what the story offered but I found myself wishing for something more from it too. I read it very quickly and would have preferred it to be a bit longer with more focus on character growth. I will definitely be reading the sequel. 3 stars.

Extra notes: Some bad language. No sex.

The Witches by Peter Curtis

Arie and I went to Amsterdam a couple of months ago to get some clothes for a big night out with his colleagues. As the English-language bookstores are in Amsterdam, he very kindly offered to buy me two books while we were there! Woo! So while I was browsing, this title The Witches caught my eye. Coincidentally enough, I’d read the book’s synopsis only a day or two before and it had struck me as interesting and the cover was really very pretty (in a slightly creepy sort of way). With this in mind, I decided to take the book.

Presentation: A large paperback. There are 346 pages broken down into 25 chapters of roughly the same length.

Story: Canon Thorby is looking for someone to replace the current headmistress, who is retiring, of his small private school in Walwyk. Miss Mayfield appears to be the perfect choice: she spent a good length of time abroad in Entuba, Africa, trying to improve the lives of the natives; she appears to be docile and keeps to herself - just the woman for the job.

But when Miss Mayfield arrives in Walwyk, she soon discovers that one of her pupils is being abused by her grandmother and for some unknown reason, this girl will not speak out against her abuser. Miss Mayfield realises that not all is quite right in this seemingly quaint village and anyone who gets too close to the truth ends up having an accident. Despite the dangers, Miss Mayfield is determined to get to the bottom of everything.

Thoughts and impressions: The first thing I have to say is that at no point did I really feel any tension. Even at the end of the book when the climax was in full swing it was never particularly suspenseful.  A lot of the time the narrative was just meandering about, hinting at various things but never getting to the point where I really wanted to know more about them. Indeed, after Miss Mayfield’s inevitable ‘accident’, I was ready to tear my hair out as it just completely stopped the story when it had only just got to the point where it was verging on getting interesting.

What’s more, there were a number of threads of the plot that were just left hanging. Miss Mayfield sets up a date with a man but the book finishes before it gets to that point. She pawns a ring as she desperately needs the cash, repeating multiple times that she wants it back but she never goes to pick it up. We never find out what happened to Rose’s letters (though I suppose we can guess).

I never really felt a connection to most of the characters and I think at times I was supposed to. Isabel Thorby is one where I don’t know how exactly I was supposed to deduce her role from the one short scene she gets towards the start of the story.

Really, I suppose that the story is perfectly fine, just somewhat dated. For all I know, this might have been typical of a horror story in the 1960s when it was written. Now, it never got my heart beating a little faster or had me hooked on every word on the page. I did, however, stop and blink a few times when I managed to forget that there have been significant advances in technology and then something is referred to in the story that was cutting-edge at that time but standard now (such as a torch with two buttons: one so the light flashes on only while the button is pressed and one that can be left down so that the light stays on.)

It’s funny that this would happen as I was almost always aware of the difference in other areas of society, such as religion. Though her religion doesn’t play a major role, Miss Mayfield does occasionally refer to God and the divine hand guiding her as well as a number of other things that were a common way of thinking in that day and age but have become less wide-spread in an increasingly atheist society.

While I’m sure that the author did her research on ‘witches’, a lot of the rites described in the book just seemed to be along the ‘we-reject-Christianity!’ lines and were designed to shock a Christian reader rather than actually being anything like the rituals I know of. As such this didn't ring true for me and just felt like anti-witchcraft propaganda.

And lastly, the ending was not very satisfactory. It felt to me as though the ending came before the story had really ended.

Style: Though the author's name on the book is masculine, this is actually a pseudonym and the author was a woman. I was fairly aware of this from the style of the narrative. I couldn’t say what, exactly stood out to me as being a marker of a female writer, but it just didn’t feel very male as I was reading it. The style is good, though the writing is full of punctuation that shouldn’t be there. There are commas randomly placed in the middle of sentences and speech marks where there is no speech. This made things confusing at times.

Final verdict: Though the style was fine, the story failed to capture and keep my attention. 2 stars.

Extra notes: I don’t remember any bad language. Sex behind closed doors.

Pariah by Thomas Emson

A couple of months ago, I went for a snoop around in Waterstone’s. I don’t often shop there as they tend to price their books 3-5€ higher than the other book shop that’s pretty much next door to them, but this time I went in wanting two particular books from the 3 for 2 piles. While I was having a bit of a browse for a third book, I came across this book. The cover immediately caught my attention. As soon as I figured out that the book was going to be about Jack the Ripper (not that hard if you read the bits of text on the cover), I was sold and I knew that this would be my third book.

So I took it home then I did a typical Rea and put it on a shelf. But it reappeared after only a couple of months, so it did well!

Presentation: A large paperback with good quality paper. The font is quite large and well-spaced. There are 455 pages broken down in 120 chapters. Obviously, the chapters aren’t very long.

Story: In 1888, the person known as Jack the Ripper ripped open four females. Unbeknownst to the world at large, each of these females had something that the real Jack needed his ripper to get for him. Jack needs five of these souls to be freed from the prison of his existence, but before he can get the fifth soul, he is tracked down by the people sworn to protect our world from him and imprisoned in a well.

In 1996, Jack managed to find a New Ripper and another four women died in London’s slums – each of them ripped open.

In 2011, Jack reaches out to the evil in a human heart and frees himself from his prison. He needs to find the New Ripper. He needs those souls. And he needs a fifth. Then Hell will reign on Earth.

Charlie Faultless lost two people close to him in those 1996 murders: his mother and his girlfriend. Their losses pushed him to murder, and murder forced him to flee his life in London’s worst slums. Fifteen years later, he’s back with the intent of writing a book about the murders. Little does he know that his return will coincide with Jack’s.

Thoughts and impressions: At the start of the book, I was sold. As I suspect is the case with many people, I find Jack the Ripper to be a fascinating case. He did, after all, go down in infamy. Due to the fact that we know so little about him, this allows authors to let their imagination go wild with ideas for what could have happened, both fantasy- and reality-based. To begin with, I got the impression that the evil entity that has taken on the name Jack was caught in some form of limbo existence. This idea for a plot could have gone so many different ways – for example, he could have been a spirit cursed by witches, or the seers of the book – but it soon became obvious to me that the book was going to go down the religious route.

Originally, I thought that it would be revealed that Jack is an embodiment of Satan, but then the snake in the Garden of Eden comes into play so I knew it couldn’t be that (Satan is a Christian concept, not Jewish, and I know that Christians imply that the snake in the Garden of Eden is Satan, but as Satan is a much more recent concept, this cannot be the case.) Jack’s actual role in everything is actually quite complicated yet at the same time simple enough, and it’s really very well-imagined. This is a different take on religion and the spin on it all is very interesting. Sometimes the plot seemed to take a few liberties, though, that some religious people may not appreciate. I really liked how God was portrayed. When he was first introduced, I just completely overlooked the character as this book does seem to suffer from too-many-character-syndrome (ie, a significant number of characters / names are introduced that do not serve a role) and I found this rather ingenious!

Talking about character introductions, the chapters are very short and jump between PoVs. Some characters only get a grand total of one chapter from their PoV, and they usually have some back story given that then becomes moot when it’s not brought up again. I think that this could have been addressed better to make the story more concise. I firmly believe that a shorter story with a tighter plot is far better than a longer one that’s full of waffling. This particular book learns towards camp-waffle.

There’s a colourful cast of pretty unsavoury characters, with the exception of Tash and Jasmin. The focus is on life in the lowest social class, in the worst slums in London and the story reflects this. It is in many ways a social commentary. In my opinion, the author did a good job of this, portraying most of his cast as unlikeable individuals who are more than happy to call each other names (both to their faces and behind their backs). The narrative is positively rife with bad language, which leads me to wonder just who this book is aimed at. Personally, I’m sceptical when it comes to stories with a religiously influenced plot but at the same time I can’t imagine many religious people really appreciating this. Some of the religious explanations did fall short for me and once the religious element had been fully introduced, I felt the story lost some of its power. The said, I did really enjoy the concept of just what a ripper is.

The narrative bounces about between years, especially towards the start of the book. The passages set in 1888 were quite possibly my favourites as they dealt with the actual events of Jack the Ripper’s spree. Other periods range from pre-history to the present day. An eternal wars seems to have raged between Jack and the people he hunts but he cannot touch them himself so he has to recruit a ripper to take what he needs from the victims. I liked this idea because it affected their interactions and had Jack been able to hunt his own victims, there wouldn’t have been much of a story to tell.

The story leaves off on a point where it hints at some form of continuation in future books, but I think that I’m happy to leave it at that. I still have one question, though: what is this significance behind Charlie having one blue eye and one brown eye? This is never addressed.

Style: Very direct and to the point. The narrative is teeming with bad language. Several c-bombs are dropped and the f-word is used very liberally. It does reflect how language is used in this part of society, though.

Final verdict: I enjoyed this one but did feel that it had room for improvement. 4 stars.

Extra notes: As mentioned, lots of swearing. Sex behind closed doors.

Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

This is a title that I’ve seen bandied about quite a lot over the past couple of years – admittedly usually being entitled superior to Twilight in all ways (though if you know me, you’ll know that I don’t exactly consider this ‘superior to Twilight’ position hard to attain.) The only Swedish lit that I have attempt to read before this was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, but it lost me somewhere in the middle of the long-winded explanation about money laundering or whatever it was. I have, however, seen and enjoyed the Swedish film so I intend to reattempt TGwtDT at some point. So, anyway, Let the Right One In was chose as a book of the month read and this presented the perfect opportunity to finally push myself to read the book. I was interested in seeing how Swedish horror lit differs to American or British horror lit.

Before I bought Let the Right One In all I knew of it was that it’s about a young boy befriending a young girl who happens to be a vampire. As such, I expected to find the book in the YA section at the store. I went in, promptly forgot the author’s name and spent ten minutes looking for it before I gave up and asked the assistant whether they had it in stock. It turns out that I couldn’t find it because it was shelved under horror, not YA! A couple of weeks later, I tucked myself into my reading hidey-hole and opened to the first page. At this point, I didn’t know what, if anything, I was expecting from the book.

Presentation: My copy is a good quality paperback with large pages. The type is relatively small but well-spaced. There are 519 pages and each chapter corresponds to one day between October 21^st and November 13^th. Not all days have a chapter and some are very eventful so there are multiple chapters (day, evening, night) corresponding to that day. Some chapters are long, others comparatively short.

Story: Twelve-year-old Oskar is not a happy child. He gets physically bullied by three classmates who ensure that no one wants to be friends with him. On top of this, his body seems to betray him, often leaking from every orifice. Miserable, he takes refuge in a life of crime – stealing in order to get a rush.

Then one night his community is rocked by a shocking crime: a murder considered ritualistic in nature. The victim, a boy Oskar’s age, is found hanging from a tree, his throat slit, his body drained of blood. It’s all anyone can talk about. But Oskar has other things on his mind when he meets Eli, the girl who has just moved in next door with her father. Here he sees a chance to make a friend, to be someone other than ‘Piggy’ squealing for the class bullies. Little does he know that Eli is not an ordinary girl; her father is not her father but a man with less than savoury reasons for being with this child, doing horrible deeds to help her – deeds that have the community in uproar, clambering for his blood.

Thoughts and impressions: The book follows multiple perspectives through the events of the three weeks. There are five PoVs that crop up more or less daily and a number of others that come and go; some only appear on one specific day when their story becomes entangled with the whole. Most of the time I had no particular gripes with the PoV changes – especially as all the important ones come together in the end – but occasionally they were changing too fast and focusing on characters that would not reappear. Tommy’s was the only frequently occurring PoV that seemed to remain on a separate level to the main plot; I’m not sure Oskar and Eli are aware of what took place in the basement. I would have liked to have seen more of a conclusion to that bit.

The vampire lore presented in the story is fascinating, a different take on it all. At no point is the reader hand fed any of the lore and they are often left to join the dots or fill in the gaps. Each point is backed up by examples in the story, sometimes quite subtle so it you blink you miss it, others are the conclusion of a very long-winded plot point. Although I shouldn’t really be calling it vampire lore, should I? It is not so much presented as vampirism as an infection that Eli is suffering from and the infected suffer symptoms similar to the accepted effects of vampirism.

Right as of the very beginning of the story my heart went out to Oskar. To be bullied in such a violent manner with no one to turn to must be beyond hard to deal with. It’s easy to see why he latches onto Eli even though she appears dirty and bedraggled. She presents a new chance for him to be someone other than the loner that no one wants to befriend because he gets picked on. His family life isn’t perfect either, though certain points there are never resolved – for an understandable reason, mind, but the story finishes before that plot point is concluded. It took me a while to really warm up to him as a character though, especially with his game. The first time I thought it was really happening and I was wondering about his sanity!

As for Eli… gosh I cringed when I read what happened when Eli became infected. Everything considered, I suppose it should be Eli who is considered the antagonist of the story but she only ever kills in order to survive herself and does seem to feel remorse for her actions. In fact, all of the characters have darker sides balanced by their good (even if questionable) intentions - except perhaps the three bullies. This serves to give the story that much more of a realistic sheen.

I’m not sure if there’s really that much of a difference in the style of the lit itself. Maybe this one was willing to go one step further with certain taboo subjects but there are British and American authors who do the same. The main difference was, of course, the setting. It is obvious that the author is very well acquainted with this setting. He succeeded in portraying the beauty of his country – particularly when Oskar goes to visit his father - but at the same time he created a darker atmosphere to suit the tone of the story. Though filed as horror, for me the horror came a distant second to the social observation in the novel. The author focuses on real problems that every community has to deal with: bullying, paedophilia, alcoholism, broken families. A number of these scenes left me cringing whereas those when Eli is killing did not inspire any tingles of discomfort in me. As a comment on society’s darker sides, this novel shines.

The only thing that didn’t work for me was when certain Swedish words were dropped but not being familiar with Sweden or Swedish culture I had no idea what they were or how I should in turn view the passage where they were situated.

Style: A mix of styles and narrators can be found in this book. Usually the general third person perspective is used – following the story in one character’s head per passage. Sometimes it slips between two or even three PoVs in one passage, though. Occasionally the narration slips into third person omniscient and the tense here tends to be changed to the present to mark the difference. It took a little while for the style to really draw me in but it got there eventually.

Final verdict: I wasn’t completely blown away but I did really enjoy this book. By the time I was half way through, I was ignoring all my other reads because I wanted to know what would happen next in this one! 4 stars.

Extra notes: There might be some swearing, I got to the point where I wasn’t paying much attention to bad language. No sex but there are very strong themes of paedophilia. I would not recommend this book for younger audiences.

The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

***WARNING***

This review is very spoiler heavy. The ending is talked about. I tried to review the book without spoilers but I just couldn’t get my emotions across as I wanted to.

I would recommend only reading this review if you have already read the book.

***WARNING***

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I first came across this title about a year ago when a blogger that I was following at the time read it for Hallowe’en and rated it as one of their favourite books of the year. It got put on a back burner of “maybe I’ll look into that one day” until my GoodReads group, Basically Books, considered it for their monthly read (it got degraded to buddy read, but no matter). So I found a copy of it for a fiver and figured I’d give it a go. It’s got all those shining reviews, right? There has to be something good about it… The fact that Twilight, Blue Bloods, Graceling, etc., all also have hundreds of shining reviews seems to have escaped me.

From just reading the synopsis, I thought it sounded rather like the literary version of M. Night Shyamalan’s film, The Village, except with zombies that invade the village instead of weird scary demon creatures. I figured I couldn’t go wrong.

Presentation: I have the British paperback version. It’s an average-sized YA book with relatively large font that is well spaced. There are 309 pages broken down into 36 chapters so the chapters aren’t particularly long.

Story: Mary has lived her whole life in her isolated village in the middle of the Forest of Hands and Teeth. They tell her that there is nothing beyond the village, only Unconsecrated (zombies) that hunger for human flesh. But her mother has always told her stories of life before the Unconsecrated, of a wide expanse of water where all you can see is more water – the ocean – and Mary clings to the hope that there has to be more out there than just her village.

When Mary’s mother is bitten, doomed to become an Unconsecrated herself, she chooses life as a zombie over death as a human. Mary’s brother, Jed, blames her for allowing their mother to make that choice and casts her out of the house. She is taken in by the Sisterhood – followers of God who run the village – where she is to become one of the Sisters as no one has asked for the right to marry her. She discovers that the Sisterhood has been keeping secrets, secrets that doom the village.

***Repeat WARNING***

This is your last chance to turn back. Spoilers ahead.

***Repeat WARNING***

Thoughts and impressions: Everything started out fine, if a little slow. There’s quite a bit of background information given in the first half of the book. You get to know Mary a bit. You’re presented with her world, her village and their customs, and some of the history. You meet the requisite love triangle – brothers Harry (who wants Mary) and Travis (whom Mary wants) – and the best friend, Cass. You see the Cathedral and the Sisterhood from the inside. You overhear whispered conversations that hint that there’s more to their world than they’re letting on. You find out that those paths the Sisters always said never lead anywhere must actually lead somewhere because a girl came down them. You discover that the Sisters must have fed this girl to the Unconsecrated because the next time she is seen, she’s on the other side of the fence and she’s moving fast – she’s not a normal zombie, she’s a speedy zombie.

But why is she speedy? you ask. That answer is not given. What has the Sisterhood to do with the Unconsecrated? you ask. You’re never told. What’s with the Bible in the locked room with scribblings in the margins? you want to know. That is something that you will have to keep wondering.

I don’t mind when a book does not answer all of the questions put forward. Really, I don’t. But some of the questions ought to be answered. I know why we don’t get the answers here – Mary doesn’t know them herself and after the Sisters sacrifice Gabrielle (the outsider) to the zombies and then get everyone in the village killed, it becomes evident that that could well be information that has died with the Sisterhood.  The story then becomes a quest for survival. It could easily have taken a different, and in my opinion more interesting, route and become a quest for answers – but the pull of the ocean is too strong. Every story should answer at least some of the major questions it poses, but in this case I get the feeling that it’s all just going to be relegated to sequels – at least I hope the sequels answer these questions! Not that I’ll be reading them.

So Mary finds herself in the fenced off paths with six other survivors of the village massacre, with no idea where they’re going or if they’ll survive. Mary becomes absolutely obsessed with Gabrielle (who follows them, bashing into the fence and trying to reach them, until she ‘burns herself out’) and the clue she left scratched into the window pane in the Cathedral – “Gabrielle XIV” (I think it was XIV, I could be wrong). So they wander around this maze with no clue where they’re going, frequently hitting dead ends and having to turn back and slowly running out of food and water. Mary gets annoyed with Harry for wanting to marry her when she wanted to marry Travis and he’s expressed reciprocal feelings; she gets mad at Travis for not coming to save her from marriage to Harry when he’d said he would; she gets mad at her brother for bringing along his infected wife and eventually coldly announces to everyone as a (very) low blow to her brother in a fight that Beth is, indeed, infected and Jed will have to behead his wife, Harry and Travis their sister. Then she wanders off on her own, feeling a little guilty but not at all ashamed of her actions and eventually makes her way back there with the information that the paths are marked by weird letters in a pattern she doesn’t understand. This is followed by more of Mary getting annoyed with Harry, the party coming close to starvation, and then Mary becoming even more one-track-minded when they discover a fence that reads “XIV” and she equates it to Gabrielle’s origins. She leads them all into a village full of zombies without thinking and they get separated – Mary and Travis end up in a house together, the other 4 ended up in a treetop “village”. Everybody has food and water, all is good.

But it’s not because Mary can’t be happy with anything! She’s in a house, safe, with the boy she claims to love and who loves her too. What does she do? She avoids him and spends her time staring at the other four in their treetop safe haven! She becomes obsessed with being remembered and not forgotten. Her old fascination for stories of the ocean rears its ugly head again (now that she no longer has Gabrielle to be obsessed with) and she takes out all her fears and frustrations of the one she supposedly loves but doesn’t want to spend time with.

Eventually things go wrong, as they inevitably would, and the zombies get into the house. So while Travis is fashioning an escape route for them, what does Mary do? She looks at photos of the world before the Unconsecrated, reads a book of poems and tries to distract Travis while he tries desperately to save her life. To make things worse, this is the second time she’s been a useless lump of lard in such a situation! During the attack on the village, Harry is busy ransacking their cottage for anything that may help them survive. What does Mary do? She lies in bed then gets up and puts her skirt and blouse on. Seriously? Seriously?! Mary could not survive on her own and it’s only because of the blind love these two men feel towards her (of which she is not worthy) that she’s even made it this far.

So Travis sends her across to the others then follows himself, but is attacked by Unconsecrated and for a moment it’s a bit touch and go as to whether or not he’ll make it. Then he comes and speaks with Mary and she pretty much tells him that he’s not enough for her, that she wants the ocean. Bitch. As if a few waves could ever make up for being loved and cared for. The ocean won’t protect you, it won’t make sure you get away from a zombie attack – in fact, if Gabrielle’s story is to be believed, it’s more likely to dump a bunch of zombies on you than protect you from them. And yet she still walks away from him.

Cue big fire forcing them to try to escape back to the fenced off paths. Travis, already wounded from a nasty break to his leg at the start of the story and then the zombie attack on the house just recently, takes a rope, leaps down and tries to make it to the paths so he can secure the rope and provide them with a means of getting across to the corridor without having to wade through zombies. He manages to secure the rope, but being already wounded, the Unconsecrated do enough damage to turn him. Too little, too late, Mary realises that he would have been enough but he’s still dead - well, undead until she slams a scythe into his neck - he still gave his life for her. This is where I admit that I cried at this point. I know that really there’s not all that much to Travis’s character – he stays quite shallow throughout the story but I view this as being in part because Mary does not allow him to become deeper. We don’t know why she loves him, we don’t know why he loves her – but this is written from the first person perspective and thus everything is only shown as Mary sees it, and Mary only chooses to see how Travis cares for her. Despite him being shallow, I liked him. By this time I did not like Mary.

She doesn’t do anything to redeem herself. In fact, in her blind obsession she manages to get Jed killed as well. Or we at least are led to assume he’s dead. He falls into a river full of zombies, but then so does she and she survives. His corpse is never found and I was half-hoping that he would just randomly reappear in the sequel, having miraculously survived his trip down the river. Then I discovered that the sequel is about Mary’s daughter Gabry (and the obsession with Gabrielle lives on!) so I lost all hope of that ever happening. The remaining 3 companions are just left in the forest - Lord knows what happens to them. But Mary gets to go and float in the sea, to taste the salt, to see the never-ending expanse of water – even if the beach is full of recently decapitated zombies. So Mary gets her happy ending. She doesn’t deserve it! She’s a selfish child who has got everyone who ever cared about her killed throughout the course of the novel. She deserved to die as well. She did not deserve to fulfil her dream of reaching the ocean.

Let me point out at this point that I have nothing against novels with bittersweet endings. The Book Thief – I cried, I hated the author for what he did (even though he announced that he was going to do it right at the very beginning of the novel) but I loved the story and recommend it to everyone. The High Lord? I cried, I hated the author for what she did, but I loved the story and still snap up everything she writes. The Saga of Darren Shan? I cried, I hated the author for what he did, but I still loved the saga as a whole. But this one? I hated the author for what she did and it brought me to the point of hating the book as well. In all the other cases, the characters had gone through such trials, so many ups and downs. Yes, they’d made mistakes at times, but they were presented as being so very human in so many ways that I knew the deaths weren’t their fault but caused by outside influences – be those bombs, fights against the enemy or whatever else. In this case, the deaths were caused by Mary’s one track mind and her obsession with getting to the ocean. She was a horrible, horrible character.

It is very rare that I get so worked up about a book that I disliked like this. It is very rare that I ever feel hatred towards a fictional character – I mean, they’re fictional, they’re not worth it. But in this case? I can’t help myself. It is stronger than I am.

Style: Fairly basic. Written in the present tense. Not essentially bad but not good. Frequently boring.

Final verdict: In another author’s capable hands, this story could have been so good. If it had taken a slightly route here, a different plot idea there, it could have been one of the better YA horror stories out there. As it is, I was intrigued by the first half, made wary by the third quarter and appalled by the ending. I wish I could unread it. 1 star.

Extra notes: No swearing (I think – if there is it didn’t stand out), no sex.