Thank you NetGalley and BooksGoSocial for providing this eARC in exchange for an honest review!
I loved this more than I anticipated. I really enjoyed the journey from very robotic to sentience for Breck and there was some great tension with his experience and Liv's. This really felt like something I would have been going crazy over when I was 13, felt very nostalgic in writing style for me. More thought provoking than I thought it would be. This book also has a very YA style twist that was played very well, I found myself going "wait how did I not predict this??" (there is also a wild q&a with the author at the end that is worth reading if just to sit in baffling silence like what did I just read)
Negative for me, the mom character was very annoying to me. Her characterization really stood out to me when compared to most of the "voices of reason" mostly being male characters. Like yes there are immature moms out there, but it felt a little mean spirited at times. Again, this is just my perspective, could read differently to different folks.
one of my faves of the series. intro to my icon Camicaze my beloved. you can't keep a bog burglar under lock and key!!!!!!!!!!!! also this epilogue made me emotional omg
Thank you NetGalley and Saga Press for providing this eARC in exchange for an honest review!
My mother has a disclaimer she likes to use when telling of a horrible thing that happened, "this is a sad story with a bad ending." That really sums up the experience of reading this book. I don't mean bad as in "poorly crafted" but bad as in you close the book feeling a sense of dread and devastation that only the best horror stories can elicit. This is my first Stephen Graham Jones book and it will not be my last! This was masterfully written. The beginning took a little bit for me to get into but I feel that may be a personal problem as I don't read a lot of historical fiction so the prose was a bit foreign to me. Once the story got going though, brain adapted and it was so so good. I truly loved how vampires are explored in this, give me grimy gross vampires over clean and cold ones any day. That said, this book's descriptions had me legitimately lightheaded at times so big warning for gore and body horror! There were moments when I was so drawn in and freaked out in a good way that I realized why people like rollercoasters (not a rollercoaster fan myself). I cannot recommend this enough to horror fans. Truly, a book that I will keep thinking about every so often and go "damn".
TWs: Gore, Body Horror, Blood, Animal Death, Vomit, Rape (minor, happens around the halfway point if anyone wants to skip that scene)