This book does a fantastic job at throwing you into its world and acclimating you to its milieu of animated rot and decay–it knows exactly what it is (and now has me wanting to view the Italian zombie flicks mentioned in the acknowledgement section. Her storytelling has the pacing, precision, and excitement of some of the genre’s best. The opening scene set the stage and my expectations perfectly the rest of the book delivered exactly what was promised. Fret not, the gnarly kills aren’t absent.
This was such a blast! I’ve read most of Judith’s books, and this perhaps the one I’d describe to be the most fun. Going into this, I was skeptical–but hoo boy, was I wrong. And thanks to Hollywood’s “sensibilities”, they’re presented in very neutered PG-13 fashion. I don’t normally vibe with paranormal elements in my horror ghosts, zombies, and haunted dolls are often mere signifiers of horror–they don’t scare me. But I would suggest reading her more refined works in Clown Hunt and We Have Summoned before tackling this one. While this wasn't Sonnet's strongest work, it still wasn't bad. I feel like if that earlier portion was shortened up, and the author spent those same pages developing the characters and dynamics within the monastery more, it may have been a positive for the overall premise. And I pretty much become uninterested when stories bring up drug use among kids, because it's such an overdone trope. I was having a hard time dealing with all of the dialogue between our main characters during the first portion of the book, before they all got to the monastery.
The writing quality was very good, as is par for the course for Judith Sonnet, and the plot wasn't bad at all, the gore was decent, but it just was all just very so so. The antagonists and protagonists were both fairly bland, and served their predictable journeys, without any further depth. A bunch of curious, party-going kids enter a forbidden place and they are killed one by one by lingering monsters. I actually just watched Night of the Demons (Newer version) last week, and this had a fair amount of comparable traits.
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