I picked up this book because a podcaster that I really like said it was one of his favorite books that he read this year, and it was maybe the best book about possession he'd ever read. That may have been the case for him, but it was definitely not the case for me personally.

While I generally like stories that have dual narratives, I tend to like them happening concurrently (like the protagonist's and antagonist's trajectories). This book had a modern-day narrative of a writer/blogger doing a story on the events that happened years ago... and the second narrative is those events actually happening. And that kind of dual narrative is one I tend to find annoying because it's so easy to have one of them feel like filler or repetitive. That was how the writer's modern day recounting felt. Whenever I got to the modern-day interludes, I found myself wanting to skip it because it distracted from the other narrative and felt redundant. The events in the story actually happened in real time and then this modern-day blogger basically circles back and goes, "Okay, so, to summarize, here's what happened back then." (It was a little more nuanced than that, but not by much).

Overall, I wasn't overly impressed with this book. The author has some great concepts for his books so I might check out another title at some point, but I'm in no particular rush based on the meh factor of this one. I just kept finding myself saying, "What's so great about this book?" while I read it.

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Created Feb 28, 2024 at 1:53pm • Submit your own review...