A creepy, semi-dystopian story with supernatural elements. It felt a little bit like the movie, The Village, but more satisfying.

I loved the story, the world building and meeting the different characters. I felt completely immersed in the story and couldn't stop reading it.

Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

The strongest element of Red in Tooth and Claw is its ambiguous, haunted, lonesome Western setting. The novel feels like it belongs to another time and place, where gunslingers used to roam across the desert on palominos and bays, and hardened bandits took advantage of the poor settlers of the West. Life was hard and mean, and people barely could scratch out a living in the dust, and life was often as lonely as the coyote's wail across the prairie. The author's use of voice, diction, and dialect for her characters is masterful. Faolan, our main character, has depth and personality in proverbial spades. Faolan and all the others BELONG to the world they're set in, and I can't praise that enough.

It's the plot where things get a bit wonky for me. I went into this expecting a horror story, perhaps if I got lucky, maybe even a werewolf Western! Despite the gorgeous cover, this is not a werewolf story. While there's horror elements- guts, gore, mysterious happenings and the like- it never actually feels tense enough to be scary. Faolan has some of the thickest plot armor of any YA protagonist so far this year, and that's really saying something. There's also a romance that feels VERY tacked on, almost like its there just to check off a prerequisite box "All YA novels must have a romance!" The nonsensical, insta-love cheesy romance combined with over use of some pretty heavy Deus ex Machinas rob what could have been a GREAT horror story of all its dread and anxiety.