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3.81 AVERAGE
3.81 AVERAGE
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Bullying, Child death, Cursing, Death, Emotional abuse, Fatphobia, Gore, Self harm, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Torture, Violence, Blood, Grief, Suicide attempt, Death of parent, Murder, Fire/Fire injury, Toxic friendship, Injury/Injury detail
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Body horror, Body shaming, Bullying, Child abuse, Child death, Confinement, Cursing, Death, Eating disorder, Fatphobia, Gore, Gun violence, Panic attacks/disorders, Physical abuse, Rape, Self harm, Terminal illness, Torture, Violence, Blood, Vomit, Medical content, Cannibalism, Medical trauma, Murder, Toxic friendship, Abandonment, Dysphoria, Injury/Injury detail, Pandemic/Epidemic
It's a bit of a gore-fest, and the book is not necessarily kind to animals, although purposefully so. Many aspects of the book are meant to creep you out, get you unsettled, and keep you on edge while you read about a group of annoying teenagers going through the worst thing possible.
I was wonderfully surprised by how many tears I had shed by then end though. At the start I really hated the cast of teen aged boys (they were very convincingly written as teen aged boys), but by the end of the novel my perspective had been masterfully turned around. They are dumb, angry, impulsive children who consistently make mistakes; but they are children and they desperately want to survive. Children should be allowed to be messy and imperfect, and not be seen as deserving of death. Add to that an emotional climax for a nerdy boy who just wanted to be viewed as cool and brave and worthy of friends. I was wrecked in the best way possible.
I have noticed some say the book was not suspenseful but I imagine that may be more of a fault with the modern reader. Much of the suspense was derived by the unknown and unpredictable in this novel. Is X character really infected, will they survive, how will Y character behave as an infected individual? All of these are questions I continually asked myself, at the behest of the author, and all of them created suspense and terror within me. If you engage with the novel it will engage back with you, and it makes me sad when it seems like so many people are unwilling to engage with the literature they consume.
I never read book descriptions all that carefully, and for some reason I thought this was going to be monster horror, or serial killer loose in the woods, something like that.
Instead, it's BODY HORROR of the worst kind - DEADLY INFECTION WITH BIOENGINEERED PARASITIC WORMS