Fairy Tales, Folklore, The Grimm Ripper,
Mushrooms
I dived right into this novel and was immediately intrigued by the premise. A kidnapped writer being forced to write murderous fairy tales for her captor to carry out. Horrifying!
I thoroughly enjoyed the characters, their backstories, their why's, the clues throughout the book (well I knew they were clues at the end but not at the time of reading - classic me).

There were some inception concepts to this book and unfortunately my brain does not compute these so I did struggle towards the end to understand what was happening but I still enjoyed the reveal at the end!
You'll like this read if you love mind bending dark fairy tales.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!

Conceptually, this book is everything you could ever want from a horror/paranormal/crime novel. The idea is solid - there are faerie tale crimes happening, and they are nasty, and they are escalating. I do feel like the plot as a whole lost where it was going though, unfortunately. It starts off strong, and it's really clear that the story was formulated around this. The twists and turns are complex, but to the point that the genre bending feels more like fatigue than anything else.

I think there's a really solid story and some really good characters in this book, they just need a little bit more teasing out and development to get where they need to be. I did enjoy some of the gore and the supernatural themes, but I think this book could use just a bit more of a straightforward path, both for the mystery and horror elements.

So if you took a bit of All the genres and threw them into a blender this comes out. Seriously, my best guess would ultimately be Horror-Paranormal-Fantasy-Parody-Agenda genre. Normally would dnf this type of book after immediately realising it was not the expected genre nor, quite frankly, anything close.
I was grossed out many times, couldn't eat for hours and took a couple days break from it, but was Determined to read the whole thing through to be fair.
What eventually helped was reading it out loud to my hubby and doing the voices for all the different characters lol That's what brought the parody to light because when read out loud it's actually quite funny.
I cannot rate this higher due to the Vulgarity, Gore, etc that im not a fan of. I expected a Mystery/Thriller and got something beyond words.
Thank you to Simon & Schuster Australia through NetGalley for this ARC. xox

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book. I was intrigued by the synopsis and liked the concept of the story. However, I'm not sure if I truly enjoyed it. It felt like something was missing for me, and I never felt fully immersed in the narrative. The back-and-forth structure caused some confusion. On a positive note, I did appreciate the fairy tale aspects and the stories woven throughout the book.

I honestly didn’t know what to expect from this book, but I was both intrigued and disappointed. The theme of fairy tale murders was unique and captivating but I felt there was just too much back and forth between characters & who each of the victims are and what they contribute to the story line. I was left confused at the cessation of this story with little understanding of what was actually going on. Unfortunately, as much as I wanted to love this book, it just missed the mark.