Let's start with the good things. Cosmic horror is probably my favorite in the horror genre. So, the antagonist of this book is both truly and deeply terrifying, and completely compelling for me. It drove me to keep reading all the way to the end. I also liked the sibling relationship between Dylan and Liz, which reminds me of my own sibling relationship sometimes. I relate to the idea that no matter how wild and unhinged my sibling gets, I will drop everything to be there for them. I also think some of the exposition was beautifully written, with vivid and creative descriptions. Ultimately, there were several engaging excerpts in the novel, and I think that the direction the plot took was well constructed. 

And now for the bad. First, I will admit that it is possible that the writing style is just not for me. However, I think that the grandiose nature of the exposition was poorly matched with the characters. It clouded the text and made it so that it was difficult to follow the story, and it made it hard to connect with the characters. 

There were a few other issues that made it difficult to connect with the characters. The dialogue was poorly constructed, and felt divergent from the exposition. The characters also just didn't talk like real people, often making the dialogue a struggle to read, which was unfortunate because that was often the only way to get information about the past or details about what was actually happening. The characters themselves don't feel completely believable. Liz's career is far too advanced for her age and qualifications. Dylan is treated like some elder, but he's still too young to rent a car in most places. I can suspend my disbelief, but combined with all the other issues, it's too hard to ignore these issues. 

Next, I found several errors. I'm not talking about a few typos either, some of these errors are egregious. For example, when a very intimate scene between Liz and her boyfriend suddenly turns into an unfortunate scene between Liz and Dylan, because the author accidentally used the wrong name. The text also wavers between the use of passive voice, active voice, and a few verb conjugation slips. These errors make the already gratuitously verbose text difficult to read. 

There are also some issues with the plot. A lot of details get lost in the murky exposition. There appear to be rules that the Dark Lady and her minions must follow, but they are confusing, and not well laid out. Dylan is meant to be this expert in the situation but we don't see that side of him very often, especially during his final ritual, which one could argue is because the fog folk started to get to him, but that isn't made clear. The scenes where we learn about the past when Dylan and Liz were kids and things with the grandmother were kind of just described or told to us instead of experienced. In a story like this, a shifting timeline might have worked better. 

I did like the direction of the plot though, and I felt the pacing was good. There are really good nuggets of exposition among the confusing or poorly constructed ones. I think that there's good parts in the text that could be worked on. It just needs that work and ideally, to see an editor to help facilitate that. As it is now, I would not recommend this title.