Story fell flat...and typos :\

What an absolutely creep-tastic wild ride of a book! Couldn't put it down.

I received this free from the publishers via NetGalley

Dee, Luke and Mike are on there way to a concert, but on the way a winter storm and a broken down car forces the three into a town called Purity Springs. The town is deserted and isn't what it seems. The next morning the towns inhabitants appear and Dee, Luke and Mike are chased and captured. The towns charismatic leader has them trapped and he intends to make Dee his new wife.

I went into Creed really exited because I wanted something creepy for my halloween read. Unfortunately I felt really let down by Creed. To me, it wasn't all that creepy. The characters at time seemed smart, but then other times, they seemed really silly and stupid. You come into a town that is deserted, everything is identical and there are some creepy documents lying around and you decide to stay the night instead of getting the hell out of there?

The story seemed unoriginal and uninteresting. You knew what was going to happen, and there weren't any shocking twists. It just didn't feel like anything special and it was very predictable. It may interest some people, but it just didn't do anything for me, which is sad because this book had so much potential and promise but it failed to deliver.

The characters also felt underdeveloped and flat. There weren't much there and there weren't much chemistry between the characters. I'm not really sure what it was but I just didn't really care for them at all.

Overall, not a read I would personally recommend, but if the book caught your attention, maybe try giving it a go for yourself.

This book was creepy, freaky, insane...

Three kids take a road trip and run out of gas in the middle of nowhere. They hike down the road and find a small deserted town. Every house is exactly the same, filled with the same disturbing items. As the trio try to escape they face horrors that they will never be able to escape since the little towns reach is farther then they first imagined.

I will never forget to fuel up... and I may never sleep again.

"But they soon discover that not everything in Purity Springs is as it seems. When the town's inhabitants suddenly appear the next morning, Dee, Luke, and Mike find themselves at the mercy of the charismatic leader, Elijah Hawkins, who plans to make Dee his new wife. Elijah's son, Joseph, offers to help them escape . . . but the price of his help may be more than Dee and her friends can bear."
When I first read the back of the cover I started thinking. "OK a horror story with mystery and suspense tied in," I thought wrong. I should have listened to reviews when I was looking at this book but I wanted to give this book a chance. I SHOULD NOT HAVE!! When I opened the book the only horror I found was the whole story line, characters and ending.



First off this book gave away what was happening from the very beginning. First off when there is a creepy town with no one in it. You DO NOT GO INTO THAT TOWN! That might be one of the first rules in a horror story. Once this happened I knew there was no hope for the characters. Next the characters follow a strange kid into a shed house after finding out that the town they are in might be filled with weirdos. Suspicious, well not enough for the characters to high-tail it out of there. The main character Dee feels sympathy for Joseph after hearing his story since she also grew up with a crazy father who almost sexually assaulted her. However you would think Dee's creepy meter would be on high alert not her sympathizer meter saying, "NO we should stay and help." RUN RUN RUN is what she should have been thinking!


This book just made no sense to me. I understand that if they hadn't had stayed there would have been no story but the story was so poorly thought out and the characters so STUPID I just couldn't handle it. Maybe this story could have been saved it it gave me the ending I wanted, no I NEEDED to have. Instead the ending I got was Dee is crazy and no one will ever believe her and the evil villain still stands. I will not spoil what happens to the other characters if you do decide to read this book I STRONGLY WARN YOU TO READ WITH CAUTION!


IN the end I was deeply disappointed by this story, however if you were still interested in this book just like I was the good thing about this book is it only took about two hours to read. I hope you tread with caution.

Cheap B-movie horror thrills abound!

I really think that anyone who has ever watched a bad horror flick will recognise the framework of this story instantly. I'm not even sure why these tropes are so damn universal in the horror genre, because they're just not scary anymore. If they ever were.

So there's three teens. Two of them are boyfriend and girlfriend (Dee and Luke) and can't keep their damn horny hands off each other. The other is a tag-along (Mike). Why is this so common, by the way? I've seen so many horror movies featuring a couple, and then a male or female third wheel just there for - seemingly - kicks.

And why are they always so horny? I'm serious. There have been essays written about old horror movies, claiming that they're actually really puritanical and attempt to teach teens what happens when you screw around before marriage. I've no idea if that's true, but it's a really common trope... teens who just want to go on a trip and get laid somehow end up trapped in a weird cult or hanging from a meat hook in some lunatic's basement.



Plus, they are so stupid. I'm sure you remember how it goes. They're camping in the middle of the woods or alone in a cabin in the middle of nowhere and suddenly there's a noise - maybe a scream or footsteps - coming from outside. It's always during the night and the damn stupid fools always have to investigate RIGHT THEN. In the middle of the night. Often barefoot and in their pajamas (though, okay, not in this case).

In this case the teens don't quite walk out in the middle of the woods. Nope. They take a shortcut down a back road.
And get lost.
And then they run out of gas.

Shit... you just KNOW what's going to happen next, don't you?

They're stranded in the middle of psychoville, AKA a "deserted" town where all the houses are identical down to the garden arrangements. Upon arrival in this town, they hole up in one of these deserted houses and find disturbing documents listing the town's population. A population that is decreasing rapidly. So, of course, they stay the night.

The next morning they meet Joseph who tells them about his father's evil cult and, though he seems more than a bit strange, they decide to follow him in the hopes of escaping. What could possibly go wrong?

Well... Elijah shows up, Dee gets captured and separated from Luke and Mike, and her day only gets worse from there. She is tied up, drugged and threatened with death unless she join the cult and comply with Elijah's wishes. The biggest crime of this story is that it feels like nothing new. I feel like I've seen this story and these characters in a hundred other horror films and books. Dee's narrative wasn't standout enough to make me want to care about her fate and everything felt more than a little cheesy.

Elijah especially felt like a cartoon villain with over-the-top mindless evil schemes. I kept picturing him with his finger poised near his mouth, laughing evilly.



I'm actually more disappointed because the author's 2015 novel sounds amazing and I love the cover. Maybe I'll try Leaver's work again when she's writing in a different genre.

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Chalk it up to my love of horror novels if you must, but Creed just didn't deliver on the creep factor that it promised. I've seen so many rave reviews of this book. Reviews that praised the tension that was built, the gore factor, and even the writing. Now that I've finished reading, I can honestly say that I don't agree with any of them. This was like watching a B-horror movie unfold, except without any of the redeeming qualities that make them fun.

I felt nothing for these three characters. No terror, no remorse, not even the tiniest inkling of emotion. What I did feel, in spades, was frustration. Dee, Luke and Mike were cardboard cutouts of what teens should be. Their flat personalities never allowed me to get close to them at all. Even Dee, who had a horrible childhood and should have felt like a stronger female character to me, felt fake. I kept waiting for her to lash out. To take all her frustration and do something big. It never came to that.

A story like this has so much potential. A city that looks abandoned but holds so many secrets. A fanatical villain who will stop at nothing to keep those secrets. Plus, three teens who have no idea what they're walking into. In a perfect world, I'd eat this story up in a heartbeat. The way it was executed in Creed just left a lot wanting for me. Nothing about this book caught me up. I wasn't connected to it at all. Even the gory parts, the parts that should have made me feel disturbed or sad, they elicited nothing from me.

Now, again, I do read a lot of horror novels. It's distinctly possible that I've reached a point where I am no longer the audience for this book. However, keep in mind that I also wasn't a fan of the writing or the characters either. I'll leave the decision up to you, as to whether Creed takes a spot on your reading list or not. It definitely wasn't for me.

I had picked this book up from the library. It must have been on my October to read list. It was a short book about 200 pages. It kept me reading. It is a horror thriller book about 3 teenagers who get stranded on a snowy road and wonder into a creepy town. This is where it gets creepy and gross.

Note sure how I felt about this one.
It was an easy but brainless read and despite the other reviews I read about it being twisted and what not I didn't find it so in the least.
Within the first half of the book I was already sick of hearing Dee repeating about how awful her life was and how her present is affected by her abusive past.
That's cool and all I guess but the author tried too hard to make her seem like damaged goods and it just didn't work out.
There wasn't much description either about the characters or scenery at all and it was fairly fast paced.
I was hoping for a much creepier cult like read then this and was pretty much disappointed.

WHAT A DISAPPOINTMENT. I can't even tell how betrayed I feel right now ... definitely a waste of time. I expected this to be a creepy, kinda scary read with a great plot and good characters ... that's definitely not what I got. I don't even know how people can shelf this as "horror" because honestly? There was NOTHING horror-like here, instead I was bored to death and couldn't wait to finish this as soon as possible.

Not everything was bad, okay. The first few chapters were actually quite promising ... the atmosphere the authors created COULD HAVE been creepy, if they wouldn't have destroyed everything in the following chapters. When I read the synopsis I couldn't help but think of Silent Hill, you know with a deserted town and sirens going off ... well, that would've been awesome! But Creed was nothing like that - too many information about a town that didn't even interest me, the weirdest "villain" I've ever read about and characters I couldn't care less about if I tried.

The authors tried to make us feel connected to or at least sympathize with the main character, Dee, through her terrible past but to be honest she mostly annoyed me. I didn't feel sorry for her or anyone else in this town. The other two guys, Mike and Luke, with which she got into town weren't present for the most part of the book and didn't seem important, so towards the end I just thought: Whatever. I don't care.

The whole plot was so ridiculous and weird. I had a hard time "accepting" all of this ... I mean, ugh. I don't want to spoiler anything, in case someone still wants to read this but it was just stupid and didn't make any sense - that's at least how I see it. Or maybe it was just not my thing, I don't know.

So, what's my conclusion? I wouldn't recommend it. In my opinion, it's not worth anyone's time and I would rather pick one of the hundred other books on my TBR than this one.

www.aworldbetweenfoldedpages.blogspot.com

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October 11:
Yeaaaah ... well. That really wasn't my thing. So different to what I expected or hoped for but nope. It was ridiculous and weird, not scary/creepy at all. Sadly.