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A review by sausome
Here There Are Monsters by Amelinda Bérubé
4.0
Frankly, I'm surprised at how many people found this disappointing or boring ... I thought it was quite good! Definitely a dark horror tale, somewhat fantasy, more Ancient-Dark-Unbending-Things-Live-in-the-Woods. This isn't a fluff tale where everything gets put in a neat package, or things seem to work out and there's love, blah blah blah. It's decidedly NOT that, and I fully appreciate that in the YA universe, where things are syrupy and sappy and dramatic and cloyingly "For-the-Kids."
The creepiness was subtle, then unwavering - kind of "The Craft" in an ancient-dark-woods-fairy kind of way, if that makes any sense at all? People are hurt; people disappear; bad things are required, and are not forgiven. The imagery is fantastic. The writing put me in the woods, in the cold and the damp. I even felt a misty kind of air in those crunching, creaking woods.
The book doesn't really gallop or even trot along, so much as slither and slip beneath a leaf-covered ground. That's what this book is like. Dark and anciently so.
The creepiness was subtle, then unwavering - kind of "The Craft" in an ancient-dark-woods-fairy kind of way, if that makes any sense at all? People are hurt; people disappear; bad things are required, and are not forgiven. The imagery is fantastic. The writing put me in the woods, in the cold and the damp. I even felt a misty kind of air in those crunching, creaking woods.
The book doesn't really gallop or even trot along, so much as slither and slip beneath a leaf-covered ground. That's what this book is like. Dark and anciently so.