Black Forest

[Blurb goes here]

If you're looking for a scary story, this is not it. This book spends too much time following a very whinny character. "But dude, he sees death people!" He sees more than that, since there are creatures out there that weren't human in the first place. I know! That in itself should be fasinating enough, but the author is more focused in the drama of it all. "I need a boyfriend," "I'm in love with my best friend," "I'm in a relationship with someone I truly hate," "No one likes me."

The main character feels a bit misogynistic at times, something I'm not willing to speculate on. It's just an observation. His decision making, always visceral, never thought out.

The story line is a bit chopped and confusing. It would seem that the author doesn't want to reveal stuff in a linear way, trying to hide one too many big reveals, when he finally comes back around to it, the big reveals you've been waiting for, are not that interesting to begin with.

But, and this is a BIG but. This is the first time I come across a book that describes young adults to a 'T', at lest from what I've seen in my immediate family. I won't go into detail here, I don't want to be killed in my sleep. The fact remains, that was pure perfection, and very, very interesting to read.

Thank you for the free copy!

Thank you to NetGalley and Inkshares for my DRC in exchange for my unbiased review.

For as long as he can remember, Nathan has been haunted by creatures he calls "deaders", disfigured and hungry ghosts. Nathan attempts to banish them with a seance that goes wrong and after which, Nathan escapes to Waxman University. Unfortunately for Nathan, young men begin to go missing from the campus. There is a bright spot; the mysterious Theo who helps Nathan in seeking out the truth of what's happening at Waxman and what is happening to Nathan. Can they figure the truth out before Nathan's reality fully breaks?

Honestly, the premise of this sounded promising; a young boy with the ability to see what others cannot and potentially using that ability to help others along with a dash of queer romance. Unfortunately, I was pretty close to DNF'ing this multiple times throughout the narrative. Dean spends A LOT of time focused on Nathan and his self-pitying love for his high school best friend, Logan, and bully Seb. It honestly was starting to read like an episode of "DeGrassi". I thought Nathan was a pretty sympathetic character and then, very quickly, I found myself annoyed with him. He just constantly waits until something happens to him rather than doing anything and it really slows down the narrative.

On top of not having a super appealing main character, the horror in this just did not pack any punch. There wasn't, at least to me, anything in the book that came across chilling, scary, visceral, etc . I think that because Nathan's internal monologue is so damn boring and the pacing of the narrative being already quite slow-paced, the bits of horror that Dean includes just fell REALLY short. And Dean does a lot of jumping around with Nathan's memories and time. I think in a different narrative and handled by a different writer, I think it would have been more effective but as it is this story and Dean's handling, it came across clunky and expository. This book could be a lot better if like 100 or more pages were edited out. There is so much time wasted on exposition and Nathan's whining.

Things do pick up around the 70-80% mark but by that time, I was speed reading and wanting to just be finished. I honestly couldn't even appreciate the ending because I was more happy with being done.

I wanted to love this book so badly. The premise was outstanding and there were absolute gems throughout the novel but all in all it was underwhelming.

I thought this was a good read and I really enjoyed the fact that it was a queer story as well. It did get a bit bogged down at points and I felt like it could have been a bit shorter and not suffered for it.

This was a fun ride. I'll start by saying that I've bumped this up from a three star to a four star solely for the fact that its a queer story, and there's a dearth of horror books starring gay male characters. I need more, quickly please.

The horror itself is great, visceral and fun. It's haunting, and the slight unreliable narrator aspect of it really lends to that feeling of wtf is going on.

My biggest issue is that I feel like at last 100 pages could have been cut out of this book, or shortened significantly, and it wouldn't have messed with the outcome or story at all. There's a whole section that is just backstory that could have been conveyed in so many other ways than it was, and that part was a huge slog to get through.

The ending though. Damn.

I recommend it if you're into horror, just know that you're not going to get something that is a cookie cutter m/m story.

For lovers of Let The Right One In. Focuses too much on how Nathan is in love with his best friend Logan, instead of getting to the monsters.

The premise of this book sounded so interesting, but sadly I didn’t really like it. Going into this book, I was intrigued to see what would happen, but it just didn’t hit the mark for me. Most of the characters weren’t really interesting to me, and the internal dialogue of the main character started to annoy me pretty quickly. The story started out interesting, but everything just takes way too long to happen. In the second half, the book gets a lot better, but at that point, I was already too annoyed/disappointed to really care anymore.

Ah. Well, for me, it was almost a DNF.

But I persisted.

Laramie shapes a fine character with Nathan and his ongoing musings with the deaders (and the rest of the gang).

There are supernatural elements, but not in a horror kind of way (for me).

Some parts too long and bits jumping around in time. Jumping that caused a little confusion at times (many).

The writing improves over the book and I will revisit the author once they have a few books under their belt.

It's over. A 2.85.

Many thanks to Inkshare and NetGalley for an Advanced Review Copy.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61053639-black-forest

I received a free copy of this from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

You can't do this to me, Black Forest. You can't give me the best premise and the best ending ever and then - the rest of it.

Black Forest is a breathless, crazed run through the mind of a gay teenager who can see ghosts. After a multipronged failure of relationships in high school made worse by his terrible visions, Nathan starts university hoping for a fresh start. Unfortunately what little control he had over his mind starts slipping away as a heady stew of murder, supernatural mindbending, and old flames tear through his life. Love that. Love all of that. Loved the ending. But.

I need to introduce this author to the concept of In Media Res. There are three parts to this book. The first part is one hundred and sixty pages of backstory to the main plot. ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY. In those one hundred and sixty pages, the mechanisms of the world are explained, Nathan almost wets himself, the barest details of his first date with Sebastian are painstakingly sketched, a Native character brings up sacred lore gifted to him by his ancient grandmother with no prompting. None of these pages are necessary. I guess a few of the scenes could have been excised and inserted in part two, or done away with in dialogue in part two. But those full 160 pages do not need to be there. They are, strangely, markedly worse written than the rest of the book just on a technical level.

And that's a shame, because the back two thirds of the book can sometimes hit incredible. The writing improves markedly and it becomes a hallucinatory trip down this young man's white-hot psyche. There's a bit at the beginning that I feel was rewritten because it's just so good. The section where Seb and Nathan hammer out sexuality and their own pasts is incredible; believable, written with an urgency and realism that is shocking. There are other flashes of brilliance coming in paragraph-length here and there, especially towards the back of the book. It's too bad these moments are swarmed by the anxious overwriting of the rest of the book.

I want to check in on this author in five years and see if they've sorted out their bad habits, or found an editor who was willing to beat back their bad habits. There is an incredible novel in here that maintains being hallucinatory rather than confusing. Unfortunately it's so overstuffed that the second character mentioned in the blurb doesn't show up til well after page 200.

Three stars, but effectively more like two and a half. The amazing parts are amazing, but more than a third of the novel is completely superfluous.

Nathan saw visions of the dead when he was a young child, then not again until his senior year of high school. Insecure, lonely, in love with his best friend, and out as a gay teen, he wonders whether these visions are real or whether or not he’s losing his mind. He seems disconnected from his family, and really had no one to confide in. His life seems to be a mess, and he’s hoping all this will change when he goes to college. But things aren’t much better there as mysterious student disappearances plague the campus, and he sees more “deaders”, as he calls them. Lonely and distraught, he performs a spell and “summons” someone to be his true friend. Nathan does meet Theo, a secretive student whom he falls for, but as they become more involved, his visions worsen as he sees the dead students, and he worries he’s the killer. His grasp on reality seems to slip.

There are moments of great writing in the book, but also moments where I just wanted to finish the book as scenes just went on and on and on. Nathan recognizes his life is a mess and knows that he may be crazy, but never seeks help. Even his best friend who knows about these visions never suggests he seek psychiatric help, a point that kept nagging at me as I read the book.

I do have to say that the ending of the book caught me by surprise.

Overall, an uneven but interesting debut novel.

My thanks to Inkshares and to Netgalley for providing an ARC of Black Forest.