Real Rating: 4.25* of five

Book 2 of two so far, and what a weird find it is! Book 1 is Signs of Pain, which I have not read...yet...but, as this is a development from it, I think I get the drift.

I've said often enough that horror only scares me when it's about people. This weirdly cozy story is in the vein (!) of Dan Wells's I Am Not a Serial Killer. Only this time it's queer and female-centered, which renders (!) it an even-more relatable process of struggle against urges one is not wise to give in to...to put it mildly. And Cherry Orozco, on Ilyn Welch's storytelling hands, still finds a credible way to harness the energy of the urges in her group therapy sessions.

Given the nature of those urges, she's got a rough go to get something good out of it. The story's got the absolute weirdest cozy vibe imaginable. I was expecting something along the lines of Dexter's hyperbloody quirkiness, and instead got something that vibes like Joan Hess's Maggody. (Though I don't want to mislead you: there is gore. Just, well, cozy gore.) That's a compliment of a high order as Arly (short for "Aerial" as in "photo") and her mom Ruby Bee (short for Rubella Belinda, as in the thing we get our kids vaccinated against) are genuinely fun to hang (!) with.

I've got to stop.

So Cherry has to get, and keep, her head in shape to find the rotten-souled responsible party behind a series of horrible mutilations of kids who encounter the razor blades left on playgrounds. As this is so horrifying to me I wanted a revenge-fantasy ending with all kinds of screaming and blood spurting as the perp was dismembered slowly. (I disapprove of traumatizing children.) Buuut noooo we got a...much more sane, more proportional if less condign ending. Dammit!

Honestly, though, do you need a better reason to pick these up than the fact they're set in Raptor Flats?! I mean! Raptor. Flats. I've about got my trunks half-packed for the move. The side characters all have a well-settled feel, so I'm guessing they's mostly brought along from book 1. Crucially I felt more like I wanted to go get to know them, not like I was trying to make new friends in high school.

The oddness of the idea is what makes my response to the book so welcoming, I think. I'm delighted by Cherry and her inner monologue; I'm charmed by the folk of Raptor Flats; I'm ready to go back already. I'm not going to tell you it's an intricately plotted puzzle. Instead I'll tell you that, every step of the way, Ilyn Welch told me a story I enjoyed reading and believed (within my scope of suspension of disbelief) was completely true to the people it involved.

I even accepted the villain's heinous villainy, and what a genuinely detestable villain indeed!, and thus child-endangering actions. Though I won't again. Once is all you get.

Fun #Deathtober romp, well worth your time and such a truly minimal amount of your treasure.

This book was ok. The author had a great writing style, but the storyline was like talk show or reality tv version of a novel. I would read more from the author in the future, just not this book.

What did I just read...? The writing style is bizarre; I'm convinced that this was "written" by an AI fed thousands of YA and crime books instead of an actual person. Not one piece of writing feels natural. There's a story, but the way it moves along from scene to scene is nonsensical. Chapters are mercifully short but dialogue (when it exists) is cringe-y bad and every action in every sentence is given extremely distracting descriptors. I would recommend avoiding this at all costs.