Alec has many good friends, a twin brother and big sister
who support him and even now a new boyfriend – well, potential boyfriend. Sure
their parents fight a lot and not all is warm and fuzzy – and his headaches can
make him damn miserable at times, but things are good.
Except those headaches are prescient – an omen of doom to
come.
When the werewolf arrives, it extracts a cost of blood. Friends, family and loved ones die, one after another. The town is rocked by a huge string of missing persons, people disappearing without a trace – and the new boyfriend Jared is more than what he seems
In the midst of chaos and loss, Alec can only find some
way to stop the werewolf before everyone he loves is killed.
We have a pretty interesting and intriguing story here –
one that takes werewolves back to being monsters, a threat a danger. Few books
have truly made the werewolf as monstrous as this one – not just in terms of
evil deeds and savage monstrosity (though the atrocities committed in this book
easily match any that the monsters have committed in others) but also in terms
of sheer unstoppability. The power of the werewolf, the horror of facing one
down, the utter helplessness of being confronted by this monster has been
excellently conveyed. The book also doesn’t pull any punches when presenting
the horror of the aftermath, the carnage, the gore, the shellshocked and
wounded survivors, the devastation left in their work.
We have some excellent hints of a broad world and some
building epic metaplot that will no doubt lead to lots of fascinating revelations
and development in the future. There’s a lot there that is being hinted at with
all kind of implications of experiments and magic and powers that I really want
to know more about
The main problem I have with this book is we have a lot
of characters who are introduced to us very quickly and not a great deal of
effort is made to develop any of them. And that includes the protagonist – who
spends a decent portion of the book unconscious – in fact, I’m not even sure if
it’s accurate to call him a protagonist because the book didn’t really focus on
him. It just didn’t really focus on anyone else either. The only person who had
a lot of her depth analysed, her past, her motivations and her pain was Ilene.
And while it’s good to get a character so developed, her motivations, her past,
her guilt, her shame, her battling to move past there, her loss and her
confusion, I’m still left kind of wondering why I spent so much time in her
head and not everyone else’s when she was so secondary to the plot.
We have a number of characters buzzing around the plot
who didn’t seem to serve any role – Alec’s doctor, police investigating missing
persons, police investigating the murders. Hey were kind of just there – and yes,
you expect all of these people to be there, but why make them such characters,
why have scenes from their point of view, why spend so much time in the heads
of people who could just as easily been reduced to names on paper? They may be relevant
later in the trilogy, I suspect several of them will be – but there’s just
bloat now. There’s just a lot of time in this book spent examining the heads of
people who aren’t really relevant to the narrative, to the detriment of the people
who actually are.
This leads to many of the horrific incidents in the book
not carrying the same weight. People are killed in this book and I’m not even
sure who they are. There are so many people wandering back and forth I needed
to keep notes just to figure out who each person was and how they related to
the protagonist and, eventually, a note on whether or not I actually needed to
care about this person, what they were doing or what they were feeling. One
small advantage of Ilene‘s over-analysis is it gave us some window into the
grief over the many many dead – but it was kind of the only window. And there
were some characters dying here who should have been utterly devastating to Alec
and quite a few other characters and it just wasn’t, not to the extent I’d
expect. I certainly wasn’t moved because I didn’t know enough about them to
connect.
It’s not like there weren’t grief scenes – Lucy had some
powerful scenes. Ilene’s loss was heart rending. Jason had an incredible broken
moment trying to prevent his wife from seeing the devastating mess left behind.
But they weren’t sustained – we had a grief scene, the pain was wonderfully and
painfully conveyed and then we moved on and, in some cases, they dead were just
completely forgotten.
Together this all combines to make it hard for me to
connect to any of the characters (except maybe Ilene) which is a shame because
some of them looked pretty decent (Lucy for one) but I had no connection with
them, we needed more focus on them, more development – especially on Alec and
Jared. Another casualty of the lack of development and bloat of characters is I
didn’t feel any real connection between Jared and Alec – I know they both found
each other attractive and they had some banter moments, but I don’t see any
more than that, and I think I’m supposed to. At best they’re friends with
benefits – and I’m not even sure on the friends part since any time they spend
in each other’s company seems to be fraught and distracted.
My next problem is the lack of any kind of resolution to
this book. The big bad just kinds of disappears. There’s a whole lot of hints
at world building: psychic abilities, bitten werewolves, born werewolves, a
pack, a food source, an ancient history, experiments etc. But they’re just that
– hints. There’s no exploration, no extrapolation and no grand reveal, partly
because most of these revelations happen close to the end of the book. There
isn’t any time for any grand reveals.
This leaves me feeling that this first book of a trilogy
is a prologue – we’re setting up Alec’s back story, introducing some concepts
and the world and introducing a lot of irrelevant characters who will later
become relevant. But it’s too long and too involved to be a prologue. It didn’t
work for me. It doesn’t help that the writing can tie itself in a knot at times
– there’s a moment early in the book where for some completely unknown reason
Alec starts rambling philosophically about water. I have no idea why, no idea
what the scene was supposed to achieve (same with the random threesome, but at
least that made sense).
We do have some considerable inclusion. Alec is bisexual
(originally he seemed to be presented as gay but then he had a threesome with
him, a man and woman – which was rather randomly inserted in there) and Jared
is his love interest so gay or bisexual. They’re lacking in any problematic
tropes and while their characters and relationship aren’t developed it’s a flaw
of writing rather than exclusion.
We have some excellent female characters – Geraldine is
capable, skilled and wise, the grandmatriarch of the family well prepared and
determined to help, protect and guide her daughter and grandchildren (I loved
her guidance when Ilene wanted to confess things to Jason – at the worst
possible time. Her recognition that sometimes a revelation is less about
informing the other person than it is about absolving your own guilt was
excellent) She and Ilene are two of the most developed characters in the story.
Lucy is strong and determined, refusing to be left out of the action even when
grief and loss and horror drives her to shock and nearly destroys her life and
so many of who she loves. She gets back up and will not be sidelined.
We have several POC – one of the police detectives is
Latina (I would say she’s a side character but this book has absolutely zero
idea how to make a character a side character, consequently, she’s quite
prominent). We also have Rene, Lucy’s boyfriend who is Black. His character is
an excellent one, he not only avoids many tropes but he carefully challenges
them, pointing out others racism and class snobbery not just overtly but also
by being a person who puts the obvious lie to everything negative believed
about him. He’s dedicated, brave and caring – and he’s well loved by Lucy and
valued by Alec both of whom fight to try and save him. Unfortunately, what they
have to save him from (a werewolf bite turning him into a bestial monster) is a
trope in and of itself, especially since he’s the only
out-of-control-animalistic werewolf we see.
In the end, we have a great story and hints of a good
world as well as some much needed inclusion. But all of it needs to be taken up
a notch – the characters, the world building – I need more to be immersed in
this, the writing didn’t engage me, the characters didn’t pull me in to
experience alongside them. It just lacked that extra to make it a great book.
