I loved the whole story but unfortunately I personally thought the book dragged in a few places. Very good writing and interesting storyline but it just wasn’t for me. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read it.

We are Monsters is an interestingly well written book which tends to be quite intellectually focussed to a specific horror/science fiction audience. Using science, psychiatry and a lovecraftian type theme to propel the story forward, in a tone that may leave some audience a bit cold but will have its significant fans that will champion the novel.

Kirk is an intelligent author who never writes down to his audience. Using scientific tense and ensuring that each character has a full back story tends to bog down the story for the people who like quick fast horror. Kirk lets his story slowly build adding multiple layers to his story through transitional passages until getting into the meat of the story. If you are a fan of this type of story, there is much to treasure. I am somewhat in the middle. I like this part of the story and enjoyed the slow build.

The middle of the story, we have the characters moving the plot forward and this I enjoyed the best. I liked how the first part of the story breaks away for the second part. You could really see the story coming together and my interest was surely piqued to see where this may go. The emotional weight of the characters really pays off from the slow burn of the beginning.

The final part of the story, left me a bit cold. This maybe more down to my personal taste of Lovecraftian/Freudian expositions although I did appreciate the merit of this section, still I wasn’t as invested as I was in the first two thirds of the novel.

The characters are very strong and well balanced. I mostly liked Eli but the other characters left me a bit cold. I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to be rooting for the main character. I didn’t really like the Alex character too much although he does work in the confines of the story. He was like a Frankenstein character and if this is the case here, there are similarities, then works exceedingly well. If we supposed to be on his side, then the book kind of fails on this front. This will be a personal decision based on each reader’s experience.

This is a slow burn and there is tremendous amount of work that was put into this and I appreciated. I enjoyed the slow burn because it did keep my interest piqued but as stated above, a little let down through my own personal tastes of the last third. The author writes very well and their fluid aspects to his credit.

Overall, this is very well written and extremely interesting. I really liked the slow burn of the story and although the last third did not live up to my own personal taste, I did admire the way it was written and really like the character personalities. Although I do think this will not be for all tastes but for those who like their horror/science fiction set in a realistic setting with an intellectual thread to feed the brain, they can not go wrong with Kirk’s novel.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC of this book. I really liked this book. Lots of suspense, great story line, kept me on edge. Another great one by this author.

I'm going to do something that I seldom do, and that is to give a review with No reminders!
My thanks, as always to Flame Tree Press, Netgalley and the Author.
I actually didn't give much of a shit for this story. It's not that it was awful, it just wasn't that great. I did enjoy the character building. It helped a great deal in my understanding.
My son, Dakota is a paranoid schizophrenic. Some people have been stupid enough to tell me that he's not that...he's actually bi-polar. No. Unless you've been there and seen both, then you don't know. Maybe that is where the cohesiveness of this tale fell apart for me. I'd love to see something like this work. I've always thought that if someone put the time and energy into finding and sharing a cure...not a fucking pill, but a cure. Like they do with cancer and such, then maybe, one day, there may be a cure. Until then? Nobody is getting better.
Good story. Great story? Naw! It was strange. I love strange, but this wasn't my kind of odd.

I have to say that this book definitely didn't go in the direction that I was expecting it to but it wasn't bad. For me, it was just a kind of average book. However, that may be because I wasn't expecting something that was more more fantastical as oppose to a slasher story.
It was definitely a slow burn kind of book. We get well into the second half of the book before any of the 'main' action starts. Prior to this there had been a lot about the characters' backgrounds, hospital politics etc and I just felt that those parts were over written and quite long compared to the parts where we saw the 'unforseen side effects' the synopsis promised us were horrifying. And for me this felt like too long of a wait and made the book a slow read.
There was a good underlying message regarding how we define reality and how we define mental illness (or who defines these things), and also a great reminder that people with severe mental illness are still people and should be treated with compassion.
Overall, I didn't hate the book but I didn't love it either so it's a solid 3 stars for me.

It's a well written book but I found it too slow at times and the book fell flat.
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

We Are Monsters is a good thriller, but it is a bit slow in parts. The characters are interesting and the premise is fascinating.

A mind bending excursion into psychosis ... this is a re-release of Brian Kirk's brilliant debut novel ... first published in 2015 to high acclaim and nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel.
Enter the confined world of the Sugar Hill mental asylum where a power struggle is evolving. Treatment methods are at odds and being disparaged by the lay board of the hospital. They are in the midst of dumping Dr Eli Alpert, the Chief Medical Director, who exposes a compassionate and humanistic approach to treatment, rather than over utilization of a polypharmacy approach. However, his protege Dr Alex Drexler is secretly working on a drug that will "cure" mental illness and return the patient to his premorbid self. With the aid of Board Director Bearman he is offcampus conducting a trial in unexpecting test subjects. His results have been less than successful ... with many subjects convinced they ventured beyond the veil of our material world and viewed what lies beyond. Alex was injecting a derivative of the neurotransmitter Dimethyltryptamine through the orbit into the pineal gland. A form of this compound is endogenous to the brain. He hypothesized that people with mental illness who experienced hallucinations and distorted perception of reality were suffering from an unregulated release of neurochemicals. His compound was designed to restore balance to the levels released by the pineal gland and thus restore the patient back to a "normal" baseline.
A rare opportunity arrives with the appearance of the asylums newest and most infamous patient, the notorous Crosby Nelson, given the appelation, "The Apocalypse Killer" As Dr Alpert falls into disfavor with the hospital board, Alex is suddenly thrust into a position of immediate ascension if he can prove his formula works by testing it on Crosby.
However this imprudent and premature venture turns into a living nightmare for all the occupants of the Sugar Hill asylum, as reality shifts on it's axis. Kirk expertly weaves a harrowing tableau , right out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. He mercilessly ratchets up the cinematic horror to almost unbearable limits, only to burst into an unimaginable but satisfying denouement. Along the way, Kirk provides pitch perfect pacing and characterizations. Kirk provides an insightful look into mental illness and how society responds ... and provides this interesting description: " Some days the world was a roiling stew of insanity, a cacophony of discordant voices, of contrasting ideas, of irrational impulses, of impossible images"
Thanks to NetGalley and Flame Tree Press for providing an Uncorrected Proof of this gem in exchange for an honest review. (Please check out ReadersRemains.com)

“We’re sick. We’re all sick. But we can be cured. And we can be kind. We don’t have to let our lives be ruled by the shadows of our past.”

We Are Monsters. This is the debut novel for Brian Kirk. As far as debuts go, this one is very impressive. Kirk is a gifted writer and it shows in his details. The characters in this book have gone through tragic beginnings that lead them in, one way or another, to Sugar Hill Mental Asylum. Some come as patients, others work there in one capacity or another.

Dr. Alex Drexler is in line to become the Chief Medical Director at Sugar Hill, a position currently held by his mentor, Dr. Eli Alpert. Alex has developed a ground-breaking new drug that could cure schizophrenia. He’s ready to claim his new status. He’s invested in his future, in his intelligence, and in himself. After a failed trial run of the drug, all of his hopes and dreams, all of his hedged bets, teeter on the precipice of total collapse. Desperate to keep what he thinks he deserves, Alex tweaks his new drug and tries it on his favorite patient, his brother, Jerry. The results are amazing. Jerry is cured. Or is he?

What Alex discovers is that his new drug may do more than cure the mind, it just might expand it.

Kirk does a fantastic job in creating a fully developed cast of characters. Dr. Alpert’s (my favorite character in the book) history is beautifully, if not heartbreakingly, scripted through various flashback chapters. If you’re familiar with my reviews, you know that chapters of “look backs” are not one of my favorite things to find in a novel, but in capable hands, I can be persuaded to follow along. Kirk handles the majority of these with precision and flare, particularly with Dr. Alpert. From Dr. Alpert’s Vietnam experience, to the young female patient he befriends early on in his career, to the woman he would fall in love with only to watch fade away, Eli's story is the true heart of We Are Monsters.

One fair warning, mid-way through the novel, all hell breaks loose. When this shift first happened, I was so confused. I was totally lost. I struggled to wrap my head around just what in the hell was suddenly going on. Hold on. This is intentional. Kirk wants us shaken, stirred, and off kilter. It puts us in the same boat as his characters. We are dropped into this mad world to figure out whether the doctors are just as broken as the patients or if something more sinister, something more fantastic is occurring.

While the search for answers did stretch on a bit too much for me, the ending is beautifully played.

“But you don’t have to carry it with you. You can let it go.”

While We Are Monsters offers plenty of nasty descriptions in some horrifying scenes, and offers up plenty of scares (mostly in the second half of the novel), it is the heart and the tragedy of the cast that push and pull this psychological horror novel to its potential. Brian Kirk delivers a smart and gritty novel that shows us that monsters do indeed exist. We all have a darkness inside, it’s how we choose to hold that darkness that either becomes our downfall or redeems us as individuals.

I give We Are Monsters 4 stars.

I got through ten chapters and had to stop reading -- although it is an interesting concept, it was a slow moving story that was a tad frustrating because it seemed to go around in circles, dragging on and on about the main character and how things are going in his life. There wasn't a character I really enjoyed reading about or following. I may attempt to skim through to get to the other parts the other readers have noted, but have not enjoyed it.

After the first few chapters of this book I was not a fan, to say the least. Maybe I wouldn't even have continued reading if it wasn't for the fact that I think if people give you a book for free to get a review, you have to do them the courtesy of giving it a fair chance. I'm glad I kept reading, because I would have missed out on a great psychological thriller.

My first issue was the writing style. Some of the imagery felt a bit too constructed and forced. It felt like the writer was trying to avoid cliche imagery so much, that he exaggerated in the opposite direction. This style continued throughout the book, but I got used to it and by the end of the book it disturbed me only occasionally.

The second issue was the characters. In the first chapters, introducing the three main characters, I had a hard time relating to any of them.
Dr. Alex Drexler seemed to be extremely self-absorbed, materialist and opportunist, and totally lacking two qualities that I would think are quite crucial for someone working as a doctor in a psychiatric institution: ethics and empathy.
Dr. Eli Alpert at first appeared to be cast just to be the opposite to Alex. Idealistic, very empathic and respectful towards his patients, opposed to drugs that merely dull the patient's symptoms and minds, advocate for a more humane treatment, but maybe a bit out of touch with reality.
Angela appears to be the middle ground when we first meet her in her professional role. She treats her patients well, appears to be empathic but also seems to have a healthy dose of realism. I thought she would be the one I could relate to, until we saw her free time 'alter ego' and her self-destructive way of letting go.
Flashbacks during the first half of the book help to give more nuance to these first impressions, but it took me a long time to start to feel some sympathy for either of them.

What I did immediately like was the foreshadowing of the horror that was to come, with a little incident in the first chapter and other events later with increasing gravity. What finally came was horror on a lot of different levels, just the way I like it.
First of all it was the horror of the idea, the concept. A drug that externalizes the 'demons' that drive violent schizophrenics to their aggressive acts, and confronts others with them as well, is a scary thought, as is living through a nightmarish version of traumatic moments of your past in order to confront your own inner demons.
Second was the imagery. Take a mental hospital, give it the typical way a dream has of being recognizable but not accurate and ever changing, fill it with ghosts that are more real than they should be, and have everything that happens to your main characters have actual consequences, so they are far from invulnerable...
I admit I had a few nights of restless sleep and bad dreams after reading these scenes...

The part I liked most was the part where each character has their own dream/hallucination and is confronted with their own issues. It is the part where I realized there was a purpose to the way the characters were built, especially in the case of Angela. It made me think about how it is not always accurate to judge someone purely based on their actions and how they appear, how it is very possible that things happened in a persons past that could make you understand them better if you knew them.

That last aspect is the main reason this book earns its fourth star for me. It is not simply a horror story. It is also a book that makes you think about mental illness, about the way it is treated in our current society, and about what that means to people who suffer from various forms and degrees of mental illness.

Struggled with this one so have skipped a formal review. It had some great ideas but the execution just didn't work for me. Unfair to review a book I wasn't able to finish.

This was an okay book. I plan to read more by this author. This book is well written and the characters are described well. I like how it has mental health representation in it.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. Thank you NetGalley.

I'm a huge fan of books that take place in asylums... and man.. this book is deep. It hit so many dark areas. I was hooked from the first chapter.

I will absolutely be reading other books by Brian Kirk!

REVIEW: WE ARE MONSTERS by Brian Kirk

Don't come to this novel expecting only light-hearted horror [is that an oxymoron?]. WE ARE MONSTERS will inspire you to think, ponder, consider, and wonder. WE ARE MONSTERS is psychological horror, suspense, mystery, thriller. Brian Kirk pulls no punches. Clearly he has researched the spotty and often unpleasant, even ugly, history of mental health "treatment." His two opposing protagonists, Dr. Eli Alpert and Dr. Alex Drexler, are both highly-educated, intelligent, psychiatrists, with experience. But they are so divergent-how can they harmonize? Eli believes in respect, Alex in pharmacology. Indeed, Alex is working on a formula to affect a complete cure from mental disorder.

WE ARE MONSTERS poses a conundrum pondered for centuries by great minds: what constitutes insanity? Who is insane? Who is qualified to determine? What treatment can be effective, and at what cost to the patient? In the end, we all are monsters.

I really wanted to like this book. I really did, but...
The effect of splitting the book in half, the extreme personalities of everyone involved in the hospital, and frankly, the fact that I know the author's short stories and enjoyed them left me wanting more.
I didn't find that there was a huge problem with the split once I got my head around it, but I did feel that the break was possibly being used as a trope rather than something that was necessary - though, to be honest, by the time I got to the end, I sort of got it.
I'm sure some of it went over my head though.
Good quality writing and the characters were filled in - but as I said, everyone seemed to be at one end of an extreme or another, and while I understand the media portrays mental health that way, I did feel that some of the information within wasn't quite as...balanced as it could be, but, as a horror novel, that's also sort of expected.

Ok what else can I say other then the fact that this read started off really good! Then somewhere in the middle it started fizzling out for me. The characters where meh and I had a pretty hard time relating to them let alone liking them. Let’s put it this way. Would I recommend this book to a friend? Probably not. Is it worth maybe trying to see if one would like it sure. It wasn’t horrible but yet it wasn’t great!

Dr Alex Dexler is a psychiatrist working in an aging psychiatric hospital. However, he has developed a drug which he is sure can revolutionize the treatment of people with severe mental illness. If only he can refine it to provide long term relief.

This is a book of two halves – literally. The first half is a very standard style of novel based primarily in the mental institution of Sugar Hill. Eli is running the hospital primarily on humanitarian grounds. Alex sees this as old fashioned and wants to promote more medication and modern approaches. He is chomping at the bit to take control and move the hospital forward. This was a reasonable read, nothing special. The characters have some dimension although everyone, not just the patients, seem to be of quite extreme personality. Eli meditates to find relief from the demons of his past. Angela, the social worker, seems to be on a mission of self destruct. Alex is very focused on money, fame and getting his Father to be proud of him. None of the characters are particularly likeable. It wasn’t until the end of this section that the book started to pick up.

The second half of the book was practically unreadable. The characters are plunged into a reality which is inside the head of one of the patients, Crosby. To be honest I just lost track of the story and once I realised that I was only skimming the pages and not reading properly I gave up. I was also not impressed by the increasing use of very foul language. I did manage to hit 80% so did give the book a good go.

This was really not the book for me and I shall not be trying any more by this author.

I received a free copy of this book via Netgalley.

We Are Monsters takes place in a mental hospital run by an aging Eli and his increasingly antiquated methods of patient treatment. Eli chooses to focus on the healing of human connection instead of the more accepted path of perpetual reliance on over-medication that has become the industry standard. Meanwhile, Alex, another doctor at the Sugar Hills Asylum has been secretly working on and testing what he hopes to be a full cure for schizophrenia. Unfortunately, Alex’s cure runs out of funding before coming to fruition so he is forced to pursue his research via a darker route.

The first half of the book spends a lot of time expositing the lives of the two doctors and the choices that led them to be the people that they have become. The book also dives into the life of Angela, one of the other workers at the hospital, and gives varying amounts of time to numerous patients within the asylum. The primary and rather on-the-nose premise given away in the title is that everyone is a little crazy -- everyone is a monster.

This is unfortunately where the book falters the most. Nobly, the tale that Brian Kirt weaves throughout We Are Monsters is one that really hammers home the humanity of those suffering mental illness. Much attention is given to the mistreatment of those in our society suffering from these afflictions. Even more so the effort to bring empathy to the clinically insane among us is an honorable one. The story’s method of much of this message is to draw comparisons to everyday people who have had to find ways to overcome trauma and contrast how some of their survival tactics really aren’t so different than the patients in the asylum. The problem is that in this honorable quest, the book all but attributes the causation and nature of evil within humanity to mental illness than can be overcome through concentrated humanistic and mystic practices.

Additionally, the book takes a very hard tonal shift just over the halfway point is quite jarring. The second half of the book drastically attempts to kick things into high gear. Unfortunately, one this part of the tale began I really struggled to maintain the interest I had throughout the first half. Along with some odd tonal choices (some attempts at dark comedy), the metaphorical nature of the themes of the book become extremely literal and a bit heavy handed.

We Are Monsters ultimately concludes on a disappointing note. Its attempts at positive themes are muddied by its extreme positing on the nature of evil and the bluntness of its delivery. Its dramatic change in pace and tone dampening the build up of its interesting original premise.

Thanks to Netgalley, Flame Tree Press, and Brian Kirk in exchange for an honest review.

I loved this book, the second half more than the first though the first is needed to set the stage. Alex is a Psychiatric Doctor working in an asylum and is being groomed to become the next Director of the hospital by his mentor and current director. However, unbeknown to Alex's mentor, their treatment methods differ greatly. Alex's mentor believes in holistic treatment with antipsychotic drugs used only when necessary where as Alex believes heavily in antipsychotics, to the point he may have secretly created an antipsychotic that can cure schizophrenia. Unfortunately, while the antipsychotic works fine animals, the formula needs to be adjusted to work on humans. Luckily Alex has a schizophrenic brother and a whole hospital full of patients to use as test subjects or perhaps just one criminally insane serial killer.

The book focuses more on questioning what is sanity? as we learn that, due to past traumas doctors are not quite sane themselves. Also explored is how people with mental disorders ought to be treated - holistically or with mind numbing drugs? As I previously said I prefer the second half of the book where we go down the rabbit hole of the mind of the insane or perhaps, a living Salvador Dali painting. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to explore these issues in a fictional way or for anyone who want to escape into madness for a few hours.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher Flame Tree Press, for an advanced electronic readers copy in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.