I received an e-ARC of this novel from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I really wanted to like this book, horror isn’t typically my favorite genre because I spook really easily, but this novel’s premise sounded interesting enough to make me want to try it. I didn’t expect to find myself absolutely bored out of my mind by this book.
If you are someone uninterested in graphic descriptions of corpses, both animal and human, and descriptions of the mutilation of those corpses, I’d skip this book. If you are looking for a horror novel that relies on more than that for its horror, I’d also skip this book. As a southerner, I wanted bone-chilling horror with the Devil in the South and instead got boring descriptions of multiple corpses, the farmland of the setting, and characters sleeping in jeans despite it being the middle of summer, which may have been the most horrifying part of this book for me.
This book is also one that I’d classify as New Adult instead of Young Adult given that the characters are all in their early twenties and therefore are dealing with adult issues and having sex that somehow forms protective magic over the land that is broken in the next chapter and therefore useless. This book is told in third-person through multiple points of view. None of these POVs are distinct enough to make it easy to tell who the central narrator of that chapter is, except in the case of Christine which was mainly because her chapters began separated from the other main characters. I never found myself caring about the characters in this story because they all felt the same and all felt flat. Kilcoyne spends so much time describing the atmosphere and the various corpses throughout the story that there’s no space for the actual characters. Despite the death, decay, and the Devil, the stakes of this book feel low, especially given that by the end of the book, any mistakes made, or losses suffered are magically fixed.