Genre: horror
Published: Rising Action Publishing, March 2025
My Rating: 1/5 stars
I truly wished I could justify a higher rating than this, but I can’t. I’m going to be as kind as I can without sacrificing honesty, and say that there’s probably an audience that will enjoy this book. Throughout, it felt very much like a B-movie-inspired creepypasta you’d read on Reddit, or hear narrated on Youtube in the case of the audiobook. If that had been what this was, I’d happily given it a like. As a novel though, (let alone one that’s being monetized), I can’t call it anything else than bad.
We follow our protagonist Mike on camping trip in Devil's Cup State Park, Colorado. When a meteor strikes and releases an infestation of predatory worm-like creatures in the lands around them, it kicks off a series of horrifying events. Mike must team up with several other campers in the area in order to survive this (possibly alien?) terror, and prevent it spread beyond the borders of the Park.
The story takes inspiration from classics like Tremors, The Troop and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but fumbles its execution in just about every way imaginable. In terms of quality of writing and storytelling, this feels like an unedited draft. Despite the overly simple single-plotline, the author still manages to leave in plotholes and unresolved threads. It’s tone feels very clumsy, as I was often unsure if the author was trying to make the protagonist seem cool or actually attempting at snarky humor… They also seriously undercut the moments that were supposed to be creepy. A phrase like “we all looked like we were run over by the exhaustion-express”, or a full paragraph where the protagonist refers to his iced coffee as “caffeination heaven” quickly breaks the little tension that it managed to establish.
Speaking of narrative tone and dialogue; the author drops the ball on almost all of the side-characters voices too. I didn’t know the authors nationality, but simply from the incredibly forced “American- and British slang” I could tell she was native to neither. Turns out, I was correct: she’s Australian living in Scotland. This clunkiness could’ve solved by an American editor reading over this manuscript just once. What couldn’t have been solved was the “Fellow-kids-level” of writing the kids and teens in this story. I’m not sure if that’s fixable at this point…
To add insult to injury, all the aforementioned problems are exaggerated by the audio-narrator. The whiny voice he uses for the kids-characters as well as the single female character (who dies very early on) are extremely off-putting, as are the attempts a stereotypical British accent.
Overall: extremely disappointing and a novel I cannot recommend in its current form. Although it might be fun enough to enjoyed for free as a creepypasta-like story for a quick horror-fix, I cannot justify paying any amount of money for this.
Many thanks regardless to Dreamscape Media and Rising Action Publishing for providing me with an audio-ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
You can find this book here on Goodreads.
