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cmrosens's review
4.0
A Disjointed Trip Through Nightmares
I enjoyed this as an easy, light read in the cozy psychological horror vein: like John Carpenter’s The Ward meets a dark, distorted, Alice in Wonderland with strong overtones of Sucker Punch.
It would work really well (imho much better!) as a graphic novel: it’s intensely visual, and if that was a project that ever got a Kickstarter, I would 100% back it.
As a novella, it had a naive dreamlike quality to it, full of disjointed dream-logic and disordered thinking from/by an unreliable narrator, from whom you are distanced by the close 3rd person POV. There were some instances where this didn’t work so well, and some small things, like the message wording, that might have been better thought through, but it all hung together reasonably well as a whole. It is intentionally confusing and jarring, so if you prefer linear narratives and don’t like nightmarish illogical sequences, this isn’t the novella for you.
There are dream symbols and nightmare scenarios, an Otherworld of monsters and creatures, and the strangeness of it pulls you through the pages to the inevitable reveal. If you are familiar with reveals of this genre (mainly in film, and I keep using film comps because I think I’ve only *read* one other comparable book to this, The Sleep Room), then you’ll know what’s going to happen, but the ride is worth getting there anyway.
I enjoyed this as an easy, light read in the cozy psychological horror vein: like John Carpenter’s The Ward meets a dark, distorted, Alice in Wonderland with strong overtones of Sucker Punch.
It would work really well (imho much better!) as a graphic novel: it’s intensely visual, and if that was a project that ever got a Kickstarter, I would 100% back it.
As a novella, it had a naive dreamlike quality to it, full of disjointed dream-logic and disordered thinking from/by an unreliable narrator, from whom you are distanced by the close 3rd person POV. There were some instances where this didn’t work so well, and some small things, like the message wording, that might have been better thought through, but it all hung together reasonably well as a whole. It is intentionally confusing and jarring, so if you prefer linear narratives and don’t like nightmarish illogical sequences, this isn’t the novella for you.
There are dream symbols and nightmare scenarios, an Otherworld of monsters and creatures, and the strangeness of it pulls you through the pages to the inevitable reveal. If you are familiar with reveals of this genre (mainly in film, and I keep using film comps because I think I’ve only *read* one other comparable book to this, The Sleep Room), then you’ll know what’s going to happen, but the ride is worth getting there anyway.
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