What a journey I had with this novel. I am, at least in name, a member of a horror book club that one of my pals put together. This was the selection, so, like a dutiful book club member I picked it up. The waitlist was forever long for the novel but eventually, the audio was available and I dug in. I was positively delighted to discover that the narrator was Kate Mulgrew, aka Captain Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager and Red from Orange is the New Black. She is a powerhouse of a woman, with a wonderfully gravelly voice and I tucked in to enjoy the ride.
However, (said with Morgan Freeman narrator voice) I would not enjoy the ride. I was having the hardest time getting through this book. It’s been a while since I’d read horror and I was finding this book tedious and slow; however, since I was on hold for the book and trying to power through, when the digital copy became available I switched over to that. And, surprise, I found it enjoyable! I mean, probably not “enjoyable” because it is a story about a Dracula-esque character who kidnaps children to sequester them away in his nightmare fueled version of Christmasland, but I digress.
So, I learned that I don’t enjoy horror as audio, because I’d rather keep the pace up a bit. And, if two mediums wasn’t enough my digital download ran out so then I picked up the physical copy from the library (somehow not on hold?) and hefted that bad boy to the finish line.
Hill has a creative imagination and there is definite grotesque things happening here, and went a little hard into some women torture elements for my taste, but a very creative book that keeps the suspense going.