No book is off-limits since horror is subjective. One example: 'The briefest visual offering of which liquefied Luke's guts, then made the sense-memory of his stomach vanish altogether into a total absence.' Huh? I don't normally rate books I haven't finished, but I will when the reason I didn't finish is because they're this bad.Here is your place to share your love or loathing for horror lit, but remember to be respectful.Ībusive comments and posts will get you banned but having a dissenting opinion is acceptable. I mean it took him 3 pages to describe one of the characters opening his eyes.Īt least it did make the nearly 300 pages I did read fly by - but mostly because I was skimming thru all these descriptions.

Instead of thorny thickets, vines and limbs scratching and ensnaring the hiker's head, legs, arms - it's words that are doing the same to you! The author has to painstakingly (and I do mean pain) dictate every single minutia of thought and movement the character makes. In some ways, the verboseness represents for the reader the virgin forest in which the characters are lost. It didn't seem to be that bad at the start, but it just seemed to get worse the further you got into the book. It was like author had a thesaurus open in front of them and wanted to get all the words from the thesaurus into their book. Great premise, especially for this time of year, but executed pretty poorly. Except I didn't think the first half was especially great. I should have paid heed to all the reviews that said the first half was great, but it went downhill from there. As the four friends stagger in the direction of salvation, they learn that death doesn't come easy among these ancient trees.

Something responsible for the bestial presence that follows their every step. The residue of old rites and pagan sacrifice for something that still exists in the forest. Ancient artifacts decorate the walls and there are bones scattered upon the dry floors.

But then they stumble across an old habitation. Lost, hungry, and surrounded by forest untouched for millennia, Luke figures things couldn't possibly get any worse. With limited experience between them, a shortcut meant to ease their hike turns into a nightmare scenario that could cost them their lives. But when Luke, the only man still single and living a precarious existence, finds he has little left in common with his well-heeled friends, tensions rise. When four old University friends set off into the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle, they aim to briefly escape the problems of their lives and reconnect with one another.

The ritual by adam nevill