Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsBlood and gore galore!
Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2020
If you enjoy a monster crunching, slurping, eviscerating, and skewering humans alive and dead, then this is the book for you. Entrails hanging from one or more of its mouths, this monster decimates the town of Devil's Gulch. And it's all because of the vaguely explained scientific experiment by a mad scientist, Stan Armstrong, who becomes the first monster snack of many.
This horror novel is a collaboration between twelve authors, with each author taking a chapter of the book. Being the wimpy horror fan that I am, barely able to handle much more than a friendly hint of monster shenanigans, this story went way past my comfort level. This monster is not a picky eater of humans, young, old, man, woman, it's all in a day or night's search for the next juicy morsel . So keep that in mind when I say that I was pretty good with the first chapter which showed us how the monster came to Devil's Gulch and then the last chapter, which gives the monster some of its own medicine. The last chapter is blood and gore but at least there is a hint of a tiny bit of mankind taking a stand and winning.
Once I read two chapters of the monster on a rampage, the following chapters were just more of the same. Each chapter is almost its own short story, with new characters that I knew not to grow attached to because this monster is unstoppable. My mind was numb by the time the second set of folks became a snack.The idea of all these authors working together on a story like this is intriguing but in the end, there is only so much that can be done to make a horrible monster, playing a bloody version of Pacman on humans, not be too much of the same thing, over and over.
Thank you to Sinister Smile Press for this ARC.
