I didn't like this book and it's a shame because it had some potential. Thank you to Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group for the ebook arc. All opinions are my own.

The characters are fine for the most part. They're all a certain stereotypical caricature and they don't really have that many personality traits outside of the little box that the author created for them. I think the worst one is Bernie. She just thought "what is the worst man I can think of?" and then multiplied by 10. His only personality trait was that he hated women.

The writing was really good, but then there was a like every so often that made me roll my eyes. Two women are talking about a man and one of them thinks about how their conversations are never going to pass the bechdel test. That's not a normal thing to say. There's also a character that says another character has main character syndrome. Just really odd choices.

I did not know that this book had trigger warnings and so I went into this completely blind. Safe to say, the multiple graphic sexual assault scenes threw me off. They were completely unnecessary as well. There are a lot of ways to indicate that a relationship is abusive without having to show something like that.

The idea and atmosphere of this is probably where the novel shines because I was pretty interested in the mystery up until the last two chapters. It all went downhill in the final act. A new villain is randomly introduced and it's not even explained how they knew to go down in the basement. We are also left with a lot of loose ends. There are two characters that disappear and we never learn what happened to them or if they are even still alive. The overarching message about the patriarchy was interesting, but it wasn't explored well at all.

Seriously the ending is terrible and I feel like the author had no idea how to finish the story so she just pulled a random ending from a hat. It definitely drags the novel down a few stars.

I really wanted to like this book. The description gave several themes I love, like fresh starts, nature, no connection to the outside world, an awesome sounding artist’s colony, and in the first half, those things felt moody and creepy and mysterious. By the second half, I was just trying to get it over with.

I enjoyed the ideas of the characters, but most of them felt like a stereotype of a person and not like someone I would want to get to know. Sarah herself is a bit plain and at times, difficult to connect with, in my opinion.

The atmosphere was great, with the secluded nature trails and waterfalls, creepy cabin, the forced proximity of sharing time with strangers, and the reveal of what was previously going on at the old hotel felt gradual enough, and interesting as we found out pieces of information from the building itself as well as Sarah’s “dreams.”

I felt that the last few chapters and the villain reveal was rushed, added as a shock value plot twist that probably most people could see coming a mile away. I was unimpressed by this clumsy ending most of all.

As I said, I wanted to like this gloomy, artsy atmosphere and the series of increasingly creepier events, but the book did not land anywhere near where I’d have liked.

Trigger warnings for this book (includes spoilers): Sexual assault, drugging, domestic violence, self-harm, animal mutilation/animal death, asylum/improper medical practices.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC.

When Sarah Carpenter is invited to an artist colony, she is all too happy to escape her current life, only to be thrust into the haunting and atmospheric Tranquil Falls.


Synopsis:

Sarah Carpenter, a potter, is fleeing an emotionally abusive and controlling boyfriend, Kyle, and headed to Tranquil Falls, an artist's retreat on the grounds of an abandoned hotel. Surrounded by the forest, waterfalls, and no cellphone signal, Sarah hopes to reinvent herself and reinvigorate her love for pottery. However, when she uncovers a corpse in a scratched-up coffin, her attempt at tranquility is shattered. Her shocking discovery starts an unsettling chain of events: the costume artist knits an endless scarf; the musician plays the same carousel song until his fingers bleed; and the calligrapher smiles with ink-stained teeth. While all the artists are falling apart, Sarah is plagued with haunting dreams of the corpse she discovered. As she investigates the crumbling hotel and its dark past, she refuses to let the past remain buried.


Review:

Let's start with the positives.

Dawson crafts compelling characters and an interesting plot. The two main characters, Sarah and Ingrid, are vastly different, so watching them interact is fun and intriguing. As Sarah's nightmares begin to haunt her daily, we watch as she struggles to maintain her grip on reality and find a new version of herself. How the nightmarish past and Sarah's present intersect is highly impactful and well crafted. Dawson writes with finesse and striking imagery.
What I loved most about Dawson's novel is the feminist commentary that discusses the blatant misogyny that most women face at some point in their lives. Sarah shares a studio with Bernie, a selfish, aged prick who refers to her as a little girl and tells her to take her "perky ass" and sit down. In response, Sarah explains that it's not the first or last time she's had to contend with a swaggering jerk who believes he is entitled to whatever he wants because he's a man. Sarah is used to this type of abuse as her ex-boyfriend subtly demands that Sarah serve him and follow his wishes. When she doesn't, he gaslights her into believing that she is in the wrong and that yes, she is overreacting. Kyle continually told her that she was crazy for thinking Kyle was too controlling or anything similar. How many times have women been told this exact sentiment? Isn't it so crazy that a woman would desire independence and the freedom to laugh at what she finds funny?!? (Sarcasm intended).
Dawson also takes on a much heavier part of womanhood: sex. In Sarah's dreams, she hears a man explain that "it's not a wife's prerogative to tell her husband no. [She] swore an oath under God to obey [her husband]." Holy crap, this struck a chord with me. I have a very vivid memory of sitting in pre-marital counseling and my pastor looking me in the eyes and saying, "Now Lara, you know a wife has to submit to her husband." While he might not have said that I was expected to have sex with my husband whenever he desired it, the message was clear: submit to whatever my husband's desires and demands are. Multiple times in the novel, several men talk about their husbandly rights, and it is disgusting to read. Thankfully, my husband is a normal man who respects me and would never push sex on me. But the idea that women are just supposed to lie down whenever their partner wants sex is all too real. While it would seem like such a sentiment is an old-fashioned idea, it's not. Consider Craig Kahler, who demanded that every single night his wife, Karen, have sex with him, even if she didn't want to or didn't feel like it. While I consider myself a feminist, the idea of consent is NOT a feminist idea. Consent is about respect and equality, and so many times we hear that a man cannot rape his wife. Marital rape was not even considered a crime in all 50 states until 1993. Only in the past 31 years has marital rape been viewed as illegal in the eyes of the law. Dawson's story, however, clearly points out that rape is rape and consent is consent, no matter the marital status or year. As readers, it is impossible not to be disgusted by such a belief, which is Dawson's goal.

Now, Dawson struggles to write an interesting exposition and sufficient resolution. The novel is off to a slow start and the resolution is a little too perfect. Dawson even falls into the trap of having a character simply explain everything that happened, much like a villain monologue. These are genuinely my only two contentions with the novel.


Ultimately, Dawson's commentary and dark imagery make this novel stand out. Make no mistake, this is a horror novel, and there are some haunting moments, but the commentary about womanhood is truly the horror of the story. I give this novel four stars and would highly recommend it.

This is not a faced paced, twisted thriller. Repeat after me this is not a thriller!!! Don’t go into it expecting that. This is a slow burn horror. It’s what I would consider a “weird book for weird girls” iykyk. If you’re going to read this, read it for the vibes. Don’t read it for the mystery/thrill because you will be disappointed, but that’s also not the point of this. I loved the setting/atmosphere SO much. It was so spooky and I really felt like I was there. Vibes 10/10. This will be such a good fall read.

I loved the (kind of) dual stories going on. The past storyline was SO interesting. Honestly, I really enjoyed both storylines and the parallels between them, and the slow decent into madness by the characters.

I do think this was slightly too long imo. And the ending wrapped up a little too nicely for my liking. Most of the story was a 4-5 for me but the ending was more like a 2. I almost would have liked it to get weirder and less based in reality

This was such a great read. Fast paced, gives you the spooky vibes that you would expect to come from it. Twisty, lots of turns and keeps you guessing to the end. We have so many secrets and so much going on in the book and will definitely keep you thinking. I love how we have a very good mix of plot and character within this and I loved every single one of the characters in here.

We follow our main character as she is trying to escape her life for a fresh start and ends up uncovering something sinister and some things are not what they seem. I cannot wait to see what else our author Delilah Dawson comes out with because I need more of her writing style. A must have on the TBR.

Pub Date: October 22, 2024

Thank you @netgalley, @randomhousepublishing and author for the arc in exchange for my honest review.

I ended up not enjoying the beginning of this book. It was ok, but felt very young.

Thank You Net Galley

☆☆☆

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

After reading Dawson's last horror romp, Bloom, I was incredibly excited at the opportunity to read her next foray into the genre. However, It Will Only Hurt For a Moment failed to reach the heights of Bloom for me.

The story takes place at an artists retreat, where our MC, Sarah, goes to find herself again following a traumatizing relationship. She wants to rediscover who she is and fall in love with her work again. But the retreat begins to fall into chaos, as secrets of the grounds and its history begin to drive everyone mad. And Sarah needs to get to the bottom of it.

The one thing that Dawson absolutely excels at here is atmosphere; it's oozing with tension. Unfortunately, it doesnt really go anywhere. As chaos envelopes the group, it become repetive, and feels like it takes too long to get to the big reveal. All of which are sometimes the pitfalls of the genre, but still. And the ending is very abrupt without much closure or finality. And the last act is a bit of a letdown.

I didnt hate my time with this one. There are parts I definitely enjoyed. Though i dont know how readily I might recommend this.

Sarah is running away from her life, leaving behind an abusive boyfriend and mother. She is starting over with an artist retreat at Tranquil Falls. At the retreat she hopes to find herself and her art again. She has high hopes for her new life until she finds a body of a young woman and weird happenings start occurring around the retreat. She is thrown into a mystery of what really happened to the young woman and what is currently happening at Tranquil Falls.

I want to start off by saying this is absolutely not my typical read, but I did really enjoy it. It was slow to start out plot wise it was more background building, to an extent about Sarah. Then we are introduced to Tranquil Falls and the artist retreat. Once more characters Ingrid Reid, Kim and the other artists are introduced the story picks up the pace. Some part of the story, the mystery was very obvious and I did figure out before the end what was going to happen by hunch. But it did not make the story any less enjoyable.

I had a hard time wanting to read this book at night because it really put me in the setting, which made reading at night spooky for me. I did most of my reading during the daylight hours. So if you like to be on the edge of your seat and feel a little jumpy like whats happening next this is a great book for that. I would say it's a solid mix of mystery and paranormal.

There are some sensitive topics involved in the book so I'd advised to read any and all content warnings. I appreciated that some parts of this sensitive topics were more historical events and not whats happening in that moment.

A few things were left unexplained by the end which was slightly frustrating, the ending was very rushed. I also wasn't super fond of the generalizations made about the artists. example having only black wardrobes, being melodramatic or edgy. This was the one thing that made me constantly roll my eyes. Other than that i would say it was a decent 3.5/5. Props to the cover art it really drew me to the book and made me request an arc that was in my normal genre.

Thank you NetGalley Delilah Dawson and Del Rey for the arc in exchange for an honest review.

After Sarah leaves a toxic relationship, she heads to a remote artist’s colony to revive her passion for pottery. Only, the premises have a dark past that want to be revealed. I absolutely loved this eerie novel, and I found myself wanting to solve the mystery the entire way. My only gripe was the ending felt unsatisfying; I wanted more resolution.

Atmospheric, engaging, and completely entertaining. A recommended purchase for collections where horror is popular.

Despite its promising premise, this book falls short due to repetitive storytelling and excessive explanation. The atmospheric setting initially captivates readers, but the plot loses momentum with mundane occurrences and predictable outcomes. Characterization feels lacking, and the addition of a romantic subplot adds little to the narrative. While the central theme of emotional abuse holds potential, heavy-handed antagonists detract from its impact, leading to a rushed and unsatisfying ending. Despite these flaws, the author's skill in creating atmosphere sparks curiosity about their previous work.

Review is available now. Published at Just a Dream blog. links available below. here is the review in full:

I've read three books by Deliah S. Dawson now and have to say...she's an excellent writer! It Will Only Hurt for a Moment is the first book I've reviewed of hers. I received it early from Net Galley and the publisher.

In It Will Only Hurt for A Moment, a woman named Sarah escapes from her horrible boyfriend and heads to an artist's retreat. What she finds there is a horror story that feels very real and very terrible. I don't want to give away too much but I'll say that its an intense ride with lots of twists.

Deliah S. Dawson knows how to keep you reading, with each chapter ending with a bit of a cliffhanger. You just keep racing forward. What will happen next? Will this story have a happy ending?! I'm not telling. I will say that It Will Only Hurt for A Moment is a satisfying read.

All of the characters in this book are unique and interesting. The whole situation is messed up. I had no idea where the story was going and honestly, I did not predict the ending. I did have a feeling certain things might happen and one of them did toward the end, but the ultimate ending? It was so shocking and so well done. This was an intense read. It was an uncomfortable read at times too. It was so well done.

And now I want to read more of Deliah S. Dawson's books. I have The Violence and I really need to put that near the top of my list to read. She is a fantastic writer. This is a fantastic book.

It Will Only Hurt for a Moment releases on October 22nd, 2024. Thank you to Random House Publishing Group for providing a digital copy of this book for review.

Thank you Netgalley for the ARC…
First of all, the scene with the glass in the clay - woah! That image has been stuck in my head for days and such a great piece of writing, so bravo for that!
There was a lot to enjoy about this book: interesting characters, a supernatural mystery… i found some of the main character’s backstory details a bit repetitive. Not sure things needed to be hammered home as much as they were. The ending really was where it fell apart for me - felt really rushed and the twist of “whodunit” was unsatisfying.
I did enjoy most of the story and the writing, and am interested in seeing what else the author writes. Just needed some more tweaking to the end to push it up a star.

This book had such a unique plot and storyline. I really loved it at first. I genuinely was waiting to see what would happen next, and excited to learn more. I loved the dream connection. Where they lost me was the actual ghost haunting. To be honest it fell a little flat and seemed like a get out of jail way to free up the current plot situation. It also felt a little unfinished. But otherwise it was well written and definitely a cool and captivating g story.

This was different! I liked it! The cover is beautiful and moody which is always a plus to me. I have been stalking Delilah Dawson since finding this book! This will be recommended to the libraries in my region. Thank you!!

I have Delilah’s middle grade novels in my classroom library. I was excited to dive into her spooky adult writing! When an artist’s retreat away from a toxic relationship begins to get eerie and ghostly, history begins to leak into current reality. I was sucked in!

I've heard only good things about Dawson's previous horror novel, so I was really excited to read her newest one. The title is very promising, after all, and the general premise very intriguing: Sarah, our protagonist, joins a reclusive artists retreat after finally escaping her abusive relationship. Her hopes of starting over are disrupted when she finds an old coffin on the grounds of the retreat, and in it the corpse of a young woman that was clearly buried alive.

The atmosphere is this book's greatest strength. The artists' colony is set right next to an old wellness resort for proper ladies, in the middle of eerie woods, with no cell signal and noone else but the artists and the colony's founders around for miles. The setting definitely works in favour of the story, which started great. I felt for Sarah and I was absorbed in the mystery and the paranormal happenings surrounding it. The book couldn't keep up its momentum, though.

The writing is very accessable, though I did feel like there were some unfortunate pop culture references that didn't work in 2024. There were also just a few too many cliffhanger chapter endings that lead to mundane solutions (of couse the chapter ending scream was just cause by a bat, times 100). The plot, after a while, got rather repetitive - a lot of talk about how peculiar artists are, a lot of talk about Sarah's past without adding anything new and exploring its core concept of emotional abuse deeply enough, a lot of the characters doing the same thing over and over again. In general, I think the book could easily have been 50 to 100 pages shorter. It definitely would have helped the pace.

I also didn't think the characters were that well-written. Most of them aren't fleshed out at all, they seem more like caricatures if at all and I didn't care whether they lived or died. Sarah was interesting enough, but wasn't memorable. There is a slight romantic subplot that I really really wasn't necessary at all.

I did really like the central theme of the story, but I do think it wasn't always explored in a satisfying way. The men were over the top villainy, which actually took away from the impact the reveals and Sarah's story could have had. Subtlety and realism can hit so much harder in these kinds of stories, because it makes us recognize the villainy, the horrors, as something known and close to home. Which makes it so much scarier, really. It's what makes Jessica Jones' Kilgrave probably the scariest, most effective Marvel villain of them all. Dawson did a good job at that with Sarah's abusive ex for the most part, though she sadly completely ruined it with the ending.

But the ending was the novel's worst part anyway. Completely rushed, with an underwhelming antagonist reveal that literally anyone will have seen coming, and a very abrupt, unsatisfying cutoff that solved nothing but also didn't provide an intriguing open ending with interesting lingering questions to ponder. It felt like the author suddenly wasn't in the mood to write anymore so she just stopped.

The ending is also what made me drop my rating from 3 to 2 stars. The vibes of this novel were amazing, I was intrigued by the mystery and creeped out by what was happening around Sarah. Yes, I got bored by the repetetive nature of the storytelling, and yes, the characters weren't groundbreaking, but it seemed like a solid middle of the road 3 star read, especially because the themes were immaculate. But the ending more or less ruined what was left of my enjoyment and I was left deeply unsatisfied as a result. Due to the writing and the atmosphere Dawson creates I still really want to check out her previous work, though.

<i>Many thanks to Random House and Netgalley for the arc!</i>

When a woman runs from her abusive boyfriend to stay in an artists' colony she is greeted by events that go from creepy to downright twisted. Sarah discovers that the colony where she and her fellow artists are staying is on the grounds of an old, shuttered and abandoned spa for rich society folk. But when she comes across dead animals and an unmarked human grave her curiosity and that of another artist whom she befriends become piqued. She develops a strange connection to the woman whose body she found, perhaps both being victims of abuse, or for whatever reason leads her down a perilous path to uncover the mystery of this property. This macabre mystery was well told, with easy to read prose, other than a few slightly outdated pop culture references (I wondered if the first draft was written some years ago and the references weren't updated or was there an intent to set this story about a decade or more in the past). The characters were not overly-developed and I would have liked a bit more depth especially of the supporting characters but the atmosphere and setting were handled well. The pacing was a bit slow at the beginning but picked up, and the ending felt a bit too neat. Overall, this was a decent read for anyone looking for a contemporary horror-mystery.
I received advanced access to this book thru NetGalley (for which I want to thank NetGalley, the publisher, Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine, Del Rey) for an honest review. The opinion expressed here is my own.

Sarah Carpenter, a woman who is trying to start over and leave behind a terrible ex boyfriend and abusive mother, wants to find herself and her love for art, specifically pottery, while taking a sabbatical of sorts in an artist colony. She doesn’t want the interruptions from outside word. Instead she finds herself in a very secluded, dark and twisted place. In the first week, there is a cemetery of dalls, a dead body being exhumed, a fellow artist dies and the more Sarah digs for the truth about what happened there, the more things happen.
This is a spooky fall read. Very atmospheric full of unease and tension. The reader is able to watch Sarah unravel page after page while she questions her sanity and wondering what is real.

This book didn't live up to my expectations. The first third of the book is a little slow. The pace picked up,, reaching an unlikely stew of a conclusion. The plot and subplots never really meshed into a cohesive theme.

I wasn't particularly drawn to any of the characters. Not very relatable, they were flat. Some characters were merely stock tropes i.e. Gail as The Villian.

I thank Netgalley and the publishers for giving me the opportunity to read this ARC.