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perusinghannah 's review for:
All the Dead Lie Down
by Kyrie McCauley
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
My, what a soulless book.
Listen, if you're going to sell your book to me as a Gothic horror, I need you to absolutely nail two things, and two things only: characterization and atmosphere. Unfortunately, both of these were bland as cardboard in All the Dead Lie Down.
Not one character felt like an authentic person to me, but I could've lived with that if they'd at least been interesting. Instead, everyone is more or less interchangeable, and that is a problem when you have significant age differences between a lot of them. Our main character Marin was especially underdeveloped considering she's constantly in the forefront, and because she was underdeveloped and bland, so was the romance that made me feel absolutely nothing.
As for the atmosphere, it felt like the author was recounting a Gothic horror movie she had once seen. The outline was there, but it's like she forgot to color in her picture, and it ended up feeling as inauthentic and dull as everything else. There was a point around three quarters in where it felt like it would finally escalate into, I don't know, something, but it was all more of the same and by that point it would've also been too little, too late.
There's nothing this book did offensively wrong (although the anxiety and grief representation is tragically shallow as well), but it just gave me nothing to get excited over and I can't justify anything more than two stars because of it. I doubt I'd pick up the author a second time.
Listen, if you're going to sell your book to me as a Gothic horror, I need you to absolutely nail two things, and two things only: characterization and atmosphere. Unfortunately, both of these were bland as cardboard in All the Dead Lie Down.
Not one character felt like an authentic person to me, but I could've lived with that if they'd at least been interesting. Instead, everyone is more or less interchangeable, and that is a problem when you have significant age differences between a lot of them. Our main character Marin was especially underdeveloped considering she's constantly in the forefront, and because she was underdeveloped and bland, so was the romance that made me feel absolutely nothing.
As for the atmosphere, it felt like the author was recounting a Gothic horror movie she had once seen. The outline was there, but it's like she forgot to color in her picture, and it ended up feeling as inauthentic and dull as everything else. There was a point around three quarters in where it felt like it would finally escalate into, I don't know, something, but it was all more of the same and by that point it would've also been too little, too late.
There's nothing this book did offensively wrong (although the anxiety and grief representation is tragically shallow as well), but it just gave me nothing to get excited over and I can't justify anything more than two stars because of it. I doubt I'd pick up the author a second time.