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A review by evenshadow
The Demonic by Lee Mountford
1.0
If this hadn’t been an audiobook, I would have thrown the paper copy at the wall and never finished it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really throw my phone, and I was stuck with not much else to do instead but slog on.
Mountford has managed to take what would otherwise be a solid jumping off point for a fairly basic but enjoyable horror story (the true events of a very old murder in his hometown) into a spectacularly bad “yarn” as he calls it. It’s hard to know what to criticize first. The writing style sounded like an inexperienced 14 year old’s first novel. Too much unnecessary description, hitting you over the head with every thought of every character, leaving nothing implied or for the reader to discern on their own. The characters are all flat with bizarrely blunt motives. It’s difficult to like anyone, and while it’s obvious he tried to show a change in some characters over the course of the book, it doesn’t work. The husband, especially, always seems like a misogynistic abusive narcissist and it’s disturbing that the author doesn’t seem to realize that there’s no shift there. There’s really no build of suspense, there’s no one to root for. It’s mind boggling that this was published in the first place.
Books like this are why people think the horror genre can’t have subtlety or substance. Mountford isn’t just ruining his own book by putting garbage like this out at such a low standard, he’s helping to ruin the whole shelf.
Mountford has managed to take what would otherwise be a solid jumping off point for a fairly basic but enjoyable horror story (the true events of a very old murder in his hometown) into a spectacularly bad “yarn” as he calls it. It’s hard to know what to criticize first. The writing style sounded like an inexperienced 14 year old’s first novel. Too much unnecessary description, hitting you over the head with every thought of every character, leaving nothing implied or for the reader to discern on their own. The characters are all flat with bizarrely blunt motives. It’s difficult to like anyone, and while it’s obvious he tried to show a change in some characters over the course of the book, it doesn’t work. The husband, especially, always seems like a misogynistic abusive narcissist and it’s disturbing that the author doesn’t seem to realize that there’s no shift there. There’s really no build of suspense, there’s no one to root for. It’s mind boggling that this was published in the first place.
Books like this are why people think the horror genre can’t have subtlety or substance. Mountford isn’t just ruining his own book by putting garbage like this out at such a low standard, he’s helping to ruin the whole shelf.