Reviews

Us by John Shupeck Jr

zraitor's review

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3.0

While well-written this one gets a bit too far fetched and goes way too far out there with little to ground it. We follow Eddie Schumbert, a serial killer with multiple personalities. Lots of them.

The Counselor, his main personality for controlling him and trying to get by discovers things aren't quite right in Eddie's mind after a period of relative stability and begins to interrogate the other personalities to find out what is going on.

She has a degree in psychology and he seems to have developed this personality to understand himself. There are fun bits about her female persona trying to control his male body and uncomfortable situations it puts her in during her stay in college.

The Counselor is joined by The Warden to keep the worst of Eddie's personalities at bay, the so-called Lowers. Eddie's mind is divided into the Upper End, Lower End, and of course, the Window where a personality walks through and gains control of the body.

We meet a lot of these different personalities and while in Eddie's mind they all have different appearances from him and completely their own quirks and talents which he uses to do various things in the real world. However, as he is a serial killer most of these multiple personalities are killers themselves and they all seem to have their own wants and needs.

Which is where we get our main conflict in this story... Most of them want out and to be in control of Eddie to satiate their own sick desires. There is a lot of gore in this as you would expect from both a serial killer story and this author.

So while we do eventually learn all about Eddie and everything is revealed I was left a bit annoyed and frustrated reading this at times. Due to the nature of the character and his many versions of himself, there wasn't much for me to latch onto. I didn't really care about which persona would win the battle or if The Counselor would figure it out and stop it all because what's to gain in the end? The Counselor is Eddie Schumbert, they all are. This is a huge plot point and the purpose of the story but that didn't change anything for me.

It's not bad by any means and it was interesting to see a mind like this play out. The always cranked up to eleven factor made it exhausting to read and it definitely felt twice as long as it was. This hurt the race against time thing it had going on because I was just waiting for it to get on with it and stop being totally nuts.
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