One hell of an excellent horror story held back from true greatness by a pretty severe flaw.

To start, I love the core idea of this book a lot! It's like Jurassic Park, but with actual malevolent monsters instead of extinct animals. The opening scene of the trees erupting from the ground and swallowing up this desert town was a blast. As for the monsters themselves, there's a ton of them with a lot of really fun designs. Personal favorites were the monster that incorporated people, the mold worm monster, the Gigglers, and the Proof Demon.

People die left and right in this book in all sorts of super gnarly ways. REALLY not a book for people with weak stomachs. At some times, I felt like it bordered on gratuitous, but hey, sometimes ya gotta get coated in copious amounts of gore. It also kind of transitions into a strange quasi-action thing in the later half too, something I didn't mind as much as I thought I would.

My main gripe with this book is the dialogue and internal voices most of the characters have. To a lesser degree, everyone sounds very samey, and unless explicitly stated, it's kind of hard to tell who is talking. The bigger problem is that the voice every one of these characters has is a snarky and wise cracking sarcasm machine. It really really got old when, for the 12th time, someone sees the most horrific shit they've ever witnessed in their lives and they immediately crack a joke about it like they're in the most recent Marvel release.

Finally, there's a lot of really unnecessary, shall we say, "male gazing" in this book. Nearly every female character (and even one of the female monsters) is oggled by characters wryly remarking on how bad it is to be doing it while still repeatedly engaging in the behavior. Look, I get it, men like gazing at attractive people, but when it's happening all the damned time by almost every main male character, I can't help but think it reflects a little something about the author.

I'm glad I read this, and I may come back to it again, but not for a while.