Mar 24, 2015: Four people with no obvious relationship all end up together in a battle against supernatural entities. If it sounds trite, I encourage you to put your disbelief aside and give it a shot. Atmosphere is what makes a horror novel, and Umbra has atmosphere in spades.

Everything about Deton academy and the surrounding town is just a little bit off in ways that make you wonder what is truly going on underneath it all. As our characters are swept further into the abyss they start to question things around them, and they certainly don’t like the answers they find.

The characters themselves are unique, with none of them fitting the usual horror stereotypes. I’m a huge fan of subverting tropes, and Alex does that here in great form.

My criticism of the story is that everything happens too quickly. I feel like there’s some context, some fact that I’m missing to help me understand the strange things that happen, but I couldn’t find it. There’s a very notable point where one or two lines of dialogue led to a sexual encounter, and I wasn’t quite sure how things had gotten to that point.

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