Warning: This review DOES contain some spoilers for the first six chapters. Skip it if you do not want major plot points revealed.
There are plenty of problems with this story, but my biggest gripe is that the author seems to regularly keep important information out of the hands of readers. She’ll hold-out on us until we’ve gotten to the point where we don’t care anymore and are annoyed with the nonsense of the story, and THEN she’ll explain something that happened two-three chapters ago. She’ll give us a brief sentence or two and a wave of her hand, and hope that it retroactively explains everything. It doesn’t. It also doesn’t do anything for the annoyance that readers have been harboring for the past few chapters/hours. And by the time the last problem is explained, readers are already getting annoyed about the latest unexplained problem.
It’s almost as if the author didn’t know where they were going with the story when they started it, and were scrambling to fix plot holes later on. This is particularly noticeable because of the fact that the author will go into details about the character’s family, but not about the most obvious plot conflicts as they occur. Perhaps the author doesn’t realize this is happening, because it makes sense to her as she’s writing it. But even if that’s the case, it doesn’t make up for the mental exhaustion that the poor plotting causes the reader.
Another problem is the characterization and tin dialogue. They go through a lot of trouble, and there’s a lot of chaos, but I just found myself having a hard time caring. There was nothing about the characters or their relationships with one another that tugged on my heartstrings. It seemed like a lot of the opportunities for true emotional depth were skipped, replaced with a retrospective telling of the situation and a footnote about the emotional impact. Because of this distance, the multiple brushes with death didn’t worry me.
When one of the original main characters dies I was more confused than anything else, and when the other left I was simply disappointed in the author for telling us about it instead of showing the situation. And I’m not even going to get into the characters that replaced the two that left. They’re New Ager sisters that I have a distinct distaste for them, which is surprising considering I know next-to-nothing about them. It’s a sad moment when I’m hoping that two of the supposedly-likable main characters end up in a life-ending scuffle with a demon.
This series seems like it’s trying to take the best of the classic horror films and shove them together. We’ve got terrorism, modern pirates, unwavering faith in God, an apocalypse, possession, shamanism, human sacrifices, demons, angels, environmentalism, mystical circles, zombies, a cross-country journey, and exorcisms. Unfortunately, the author just doesn’t seem to have the chops to pull off the intensity of all of these different elements, or the skill to weave them all seamlessly together in the prose. The grammar isn’t good, the characterization’s poor, and the plotting’s splotchy at best.
It’s particularly depressing because the basic premise of this is gold. It has all of my favorite classic horror tropes: truly evil demons (not the romantic type that’s so common now-a-days), evacuations, humans who are so desperate they become evil, human sacrifices, and an apocalypse. Perhaps in another authors’ hands this would have become a series that I couldn’t put down, but unfortunately I found myself hoping the chapters would just end. It’s really a shame, but I can’t recommend this to even the most hardcore of horror fans. There are B-movies, and then there’s this: a D-lister, at best.
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