Thanks to Mutated Media and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Our Black Hearts Beat as One by Brian Peter Asman is a tale of self discovery and healing told in the way of HP Lovecraft. Michael Mallory’s band, Modern Love, is finally making it when his world comes crashing down. After a breakup with his live-in girlfriend, Michael begins to explore the city’s occult underground in search of healing. I really enjoyed this story; the pacing was great and the Lovecraftian mood set by the author made this book that much more enjoyable. I would recommend this book to readers that enjoy reads about self discovery, love (of all kinds), Lovecraft, Greek mythology, and weird fiction.

I have literally just finished Our Black Hearts Beat As One and whilst I feel like that phrase will be carried with me for a while, I’m really not sure if I enjoyed this. It felt quite mixed and unsure in places and at this point, I really can’t say I enjoyed it! Love the concept, wasn’t a fan of the outcome.

This novella is the closest thing to a love story that you'll find in a horror book. Because most love stories don't include gods, the taking of a human heart, or creatures hiding in culvert tunnels. But you'll find all of these in this wild, tragic breakup tale.

It's an ages old story: girl leaves boy, boy is crushed and confused, bad stuff happens. But in this book the bad stuff is not only physical and emotional it supernatural as well. And if you've read this author's book, Man F*ck This House, you know that he is great at taking something familiar and turning it into a whole nother creature. This book is no exception.

It gets bloody and vicious but is also heartfelt and warm. Finding out how to stop the pain of this breakup and what's required from this creature is twisted and weird (in a good way). This works extremely well and made this novella a one sit read for me. It was just that good.

I highly recommend this one.

A man named Mike gets his heartbroken by his girlfriend breaking up with him and decides to give away his heart. But at what price? The story premise was nice but not at all well executed past the first thirty pages. Not my favorite horror book.

Our Black Hearts Beat as One focuses on Modern Love frontman Mike Mallory as he deals with the heartache left behind from his long term girlfriend leaving him. To find a cure for his broken heart, Mike finds himself involved with the occult and quickly realises he has gotten himself too deep in something he doesn’t understand.

This book is a fun short horror with lots of unexpected twists and turns.

I enjoyed reading this book, my favourite chapter was The Mirrors as I loved Evangeline and really connected with the way this chapter was written. I would have enjoyed learning more about her in the book.

At times I felt that the book was a bit too fast paced, especially at the beginning. It felt like the story was jumping about without delving into what was happening. However, once Mike started collecting the stories the story seemed to flow better and followed a good pace.

I would definitely read other books from this author as I thought this book was interesting and completely different to other horror books I’ve read before.

A huge thanks to NetGalley and Mutated Media for providing me with this arc.

This started out pretty straight forward. Rocker guy gets dumped by witchy girlfriend. He's heartbroken, accidently intentionally casts a spell to have his heart removed after finding a spell book.
So up until THAT point I was totally following.

But then shit got weird and he was on some strange "quest" and I got lost. Now don't get me wrong there was plenty of action and I wanted to see where this was going for sure because I knew it would come back around and it did.

And we got back on track, and I had clarity... for a bit, then even the freaking author said if you want to stop now you can, and maybe I should have but I didn't. Then I got lost AGAIN only to be brought back and thought to myself "OH so that's what the book was about..."

Thank you to NetGalley and Mutated Media for this opportunity to read rate and review this arc which will be available October 24,2023!

I honestly am knocked speechless by this book! It did not go the way I thought and I absolutely love it. If I could rate it a 4.7 ⭐️ I would.

So musician Mike Mallory gets dumped out of the blue by Kara, his witchy occulty girlfriend. He goes on a bender. Has sweat soaked nightmares on the couch seeing inexplicable things. Then he sees in Kara’s old art studio that the closet is open. He finds a book. Then Mike does the dumbest thing ever and creates a spell with his guitar and song writing. Effectively killing his heart.

What happens afterwards is truly the most romantic yet horrifying series of events that had left me utterly stunned. Like this is a horror book but it has a HEA?

So trippy but so worth the read. And it is a quick read.

It's been almost a week since I finished this book and I've been trying to come up with a decent review so at this point I think it's time I give up on the idea of having anything particularly interesting to say.
This book gave me Gaiman at his peak vibes (Neverwhere was his best work and I will not hear otherwise) but without feeling derivative. You have a random dude accidentally stepping into an "underworld" that has been under his nose the entire time because he is impulsive and not too bright. This is a potentially costly mistake, chaos ensues. The story is an urban fantasy with the potentiality of going full horror and a somewhat cozy somewhat edgy treatment you get the idea and parallels, hopefully.
Overall, it was a pleasant and quick read that had a lot of charm.
I liked Mike well enough, but I wanted more Evangeline couldn't help but think she was a more interesting person perhaps because aside from him being broken-hearted we don't get that much about who Mike is as a person.
I enjoyed the songbook at the end but I'm not entirely sure what Modern Love was supposed to sound like and in my head they sounded like Dead On A Sunday, I wonder how far from what the author imagined their sound being like I was.

Mike Mallory, frontman of the rock band Modern Love, comes home one night to find his girlfriend is leaving him. Mike spends nights wandering the city looking for some way to relieve his pain, stumbling upon an occult underbelly that seems to provide him a solution.

Overall, I enjoyed this as a story of loss, pain, and that feeling like you'll never recover from the heartbreak. However, the horror/occult aspects didn't grab me as much as I would have liked.

Mike had potential to be a great character but fell slightly short for me. I feel like the only things I learned about him were he made music and had an (ex-)girlfriend. The descriptions of his emotional state following the break-up and throughout the story were good though, and I understood his motivations.
I found the occult aspects great in the beginning, but they started getting a little confusing. There was a chunk of mythology explanations in the middle that I had to re-read a few times before I understood what was going on and even after that I lost the thread a little.

The pacing of this book also felt a little rushed. It's a short book, that could have been improved by becoming longer with more character building and slowing the pace down.

Summary - I wanted to enjoy this more than I actually did. It's got some great potential but it just felt too much, too fast.

Felt too much like a YA novel to me. As if it was made for a younger audience than me and just went all out with the type of language and mood suited better for them. Not easy for me to enjoy.

"Mike tried to make conversation, but she ignored him. Bored, he looked at the billboards- mostly blank."

This pretty much sums up my feelings towards this book. I was bored and it was all blank. The dialogue in the story was pointless it all eluded to nothing. Didn't benefit the story in anyway. There's a scene where a girl sleeps with the main character Mike and it describes that neither of them were into it. It was a pointless however many pages it was and didn't relate to the story. I think there was an idea here but it's not clear.

I didn’t expect the turn this book took. I went into this blindly. It’s not something I’d usually read but I liked this. It made you really think about life and how eventually you can overcome something that truly hurts. It was a nice little slightly supernatural love story about two people going through pain and come out of it together and for me that was worth it. I’d read more from the author!

Title: Our black hearts beat as one
Author: Brian Asman
Rating ⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

Synopsis:

Michael Mallory’s living the dream as the lead singer of a hot, up-and-coming band, Modern Love. When a sudden breakup shatters his world, he plunged headlong into the city’s occult underbelly in a bid to salve his pain. Lost amidst wayward souls and brutish killers, godlings and grotesqueries, Mike’s about to learn one incontrovertible fact.

There’s nothing more terrible than love.

Review:

This book was definitely an interesting read. We meet the main character Mike who is in a relationship with Kara, the pair have been living together until Kara decides it isn’t working. When Kara moves out, Mike is sent into a downward spiral, feeling lost and confused. On a mission to find Kara and attempt to get her back, Mike begins wandering the streets, hopeful every time he sees someone who resembles his lost lover. Mike accidentally stumbles upon a creature so foul that it curls his stomach.

I will admit that this threw me by surprise having learnt not a lot about the relationship initially. I felt that the story was quite fast paced and at times found myself questioning whether I had missed information which would have helped to make more sense of the plot. However, the story progresses and Mike finds himself in a situation he could never have imagined. He has been sent on a quest to find 3 stories revolving around love. Mike embarks on this journey with a girl called Evangeline who seems knowledgeable on the terms of his quest.

There wasn’t really much backstory to how the quest came about other than a few pieces of information that you have to piece together to make sense of it but I was intrigued nonetheless. I continued to read on and began to learn more about this mystery character Evangeline. Her story was one I wasn’t expecting but captured my interest.

The sequencing of the story threw me a little bit as it felt as though some pieces came later than they should have which often left me questioning what was happening.

It was a very good concept for a plot and I think it has potential to be a very good read however it would have been nice to read some more backstory into the characters with some more world building. There were elements of the story that I found confusing and hard to follow especially with a lack of substance. I gave this book 3 stars because I thought it was an interesting read but there were a few things I would have preferred to have been done differently to make it more seamless.

Thank you for this opportunity! I am by no means a big Horror fan - if I'm being completely honest, I tend to avoid it haha. Last year though, I made it one of my reading goals to read more Horror stories and just barely succeeded, so I want to push myself to read even more this year! I found the premise of this story to be really intriguing to me, so I'm excited to see where this goes and how I fare with it.

Mike, the lead singer in a band called, “Modern Love” and Kara, an artist who dabbles in the occult have been in a committed relationship for three years. Their love life is perfect, so Mike believes. Until the day Mike returns home after having a few drinks with the boys in the band. Upon his return home he finds Kara has packed up all her belongings and is leaving for good. Mike with a broken heart and unable to find closure begins his dissent into self destruction. On impulse, Mike does something without understanding the consequences of what he has done.
Desperate and confused, Mike stubbles upon a world where nothing is as it seems. Wanting nothing but to drown his sorrow he walks into a bar where everything changes.
When I began to read this story, I was close to giving up. I kept thinking there were pages I had missed. It felt as if I was missing an important part of the story. I hung in there and now believe the author had intentionally wanted me to feel how Mike in the story must have felt. I finally got my bearings back and threw myself into the world that had been created for Mike.
This is a short story, it is not 128 pages long. It is actually less than 100 pages. The page numbers skip and the last three are song lyrics. This story was basically about two people traumatized by love who heal one another. It’s romance with a supernatural twist. I did however enjoy the ride.

Well.... this was a very weird but interesting read. Michael is the MMC, his girlfriend leaves him. He is down a dark path when he comes across someone who can help him mend his heart. I dont know how I feel about this to be honest. The book wasnt the type of horror I usually read but overall I like the author and wanted to give this book a shot.