This was a wild ride that masterfully blends horror and humor in equal measure. Ernest Jensen’s use of body horror is deeply unsettling yet brilliantly offset by sharp, laugh out loud wit. The book evoked the same thrilling, creature feature vibe as the 1990's film Tremors, a comparison I make with the highest praise.

While some sections felt a bit repetitive and meandered at times, the journey was well worth it. The twist ending completely caught me off guard and was an absolute delight!

I would rate this as 3.5 Stars but I will round up to 4 Stars on platforms that do not provide the half star option. Thank you for the opportunity to listen to this Audio ARC!

Thanks to NetGalley for letting me listen to this audiobook. I would recommend listening to the audio instead of reading print because it was an engaging performance.
The story itself was a lot of fun, heavy on body horror and wilderness horror. A group of people in the wilderness encounter deadly worms after a meteor and face a struggle to survive. I do wish there was more description of their personalities and of the action, but the story was interesting and fun and I didn't want to stop.

READ IT IF YOU'RE INTEREST IN
- Survival/wilderness horror
- Camping/hiking
- This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer
- Debut novels
- Body horror
- Cosmic horror
- Friendship trips
- Fast paced

TW: body horror, death, gore, gun violence, animal death, blood, excrement, grief, murder, injury detail

BRIEF REVIEW
This story had real potential and still was an enjoyable read but I wouldn't read it again. None of the characters grabbed me and it could have been more atmospheric to make it scarier. There could have been way more description done of the creatures and the kills.

Nameless Things by Ernest Jensen narrated by Tim Lounibos was a disgustingly fun romp through the woods of Colorado! Without spoiling too much, I'd say this book is if Tremors, The Thing, and....maybe a Blair Witch/The Faculty hybrid.
I listened to this book, all in an afternoon--had to know where this was going. Easily accessible horror with sci-fi elements, with some great, albeit short, body horror scenes. I will say, I did keep mixing the characters up with each other--I think at a point, we'd just added too many hikers to this group--and I just cared far less about most of the characters that came into the story a little later. Me: "Like, wait, who fell? Who the hell is that?" *rewind 3 times* Additionally, the characters' banter just didn't bring much to the story.
In terms of the audio, I thought it the quality was clear and crisp. I would say, I think with a different narrator, certain more tense parts of the book didn't quite land for me, as one might assume the prose. Not sure if it was an accent and/inflection thing, more than a just the monotonous tone. I think that works for some books, just not necessarily horror.
That said, still a very well-paced audiobook, that had me devouring it. Thank you so much for the chance to listen to this ARC :)

Wow this was FUCKED UP and i loved it. An utterly delicious horror laced with gore, aliens, and self-interested assholes. I loooooved how scary the progression of the story was, and my only real complaint is that the descriptions of the creatures at every stage wasn't a bit more descriptive so we could reeeeally see it. Anyway, good shit!!

rep: gay man mc, characters of color

spice: none

tw: gore, invasive species, necromancy, reanimated corpses, the ground is literally death, murder

This was such a good book. I loved the story and the writing so much. The characters were great and the story flowed smoothly. Will definitely read more books by this author in the future.

Nameless Things
Ernest Jensen

Felt like a fun horror movie from the 80's.
It's serving Tremors, a la Nick Cutter.
3.75 / 5

Well, this is a full on action packed story! It starts with the weird and just keeps on getting weirder..

Little tiny worms have invaded an area where some people are camping. The worms aren't you average type, these are some evil worms.

Its Worm-aggeden to the extreme! Also, I got a little nauseous with some of those scenes. I freaking loved it! Ha!

The narrator did a terrific job bringing the emotion to the story. Well done!

#NetGalley #NamelessThings

I truly wished I could justify a higher rating than this, but I can’t. I’m going to be as kind as I can without sacrificing honesty, and say that there’s probably an audience that will enjoy this book. Throughout, it felt very much like a B-movie-inspired creepypasta you’d read on Reddit, or hear narrated on Youtube in the case of the audiobook. If that had been what this was, I’d happily given it a like. As a novel though, (let alone one that’s being monetized), I can’t call it anything else than bad.

We follow our protagonist Mike on camping trip in Devil's Cup State Park, Colorado. When a meteor strikes and releases an infestation of predatory worm-like creatures in the lands around them, it kicks off a series of horrifying events. Mike must team up with several other campers in the area in order to survive this (possibly alien?) terror, and prevent it spread beyond the borders of the Park.

The story takes inspiration from classics like Tremors, The Troop and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but fumbles its execution in just about every way imaginable. In terms of quality of writing and storytelling, this feels like an unedited draft. Despite the overly simple single-plotline, the author still manages to leave in plotholes and unresolved threads. It’s tone feels very clumsy, as I was often unsure if the author was trying to make the protagonist seem cool or actually attempting at snarky humor… They also seriously undercut the moments that were supposed to be creepy. A phrase like “we all looked like we were run over by the exhaustion-express”, or a full paragraph where the protagonist refers to his iced coffee as “caffeination heaven” quickly breaks the little tension that it managed to establish.
Speaking of narrative tone and dialogue; the author drops the ball on almost all of the side-characters voices too. I didn’t know the authors nationality, but simply from the incredibly forced “American- and British slang” I could tell she was native to neither. Turns out, I was correct: she’s Australian living in Scotland. This clunkiness could’ve solved by an American editor reading over this manuscript just once. What couldn’t have been solved was the “Fellow-kids-level” of writing the kids and teens in this story. I’m not sure if that’s fixable at this point…

To add insult to injury, all the aforementioned problems are exaggerated by the audio-narrator. The whiny voice he uses for the kids-characters as well as the single female character (who dies very early on) are extremely off-putting, as are the attempts a stereotypical British accent.
Overall: extremely disappointing and a novel I cannot recommend in its current form. Although it might be fun enough to enjoyed for free as a creepypasta-like story for a quick horror-fix, I cannot justify paying any amount of money for this.

Many thanks regardless to Dreamscape Media and the author for providing me with an audio-ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

1,25 ??
I really wished I had enjoyed this book more, but I honestly never truly knew what was going on. I never really connected with the characters nor the writing style and the tone of the narrator certainly didn't help. It was very "action movie written for teenage boys" rather than "holy shit bio-hazard meteors???". I refuse to believe Mike is 30, I genuinely found him insufferable.
Listening to this audiobook kinda felt like watching those youtube "overview of (X Horror movie)" videos where everything is very sensational and they're giving you all the gory scenes, some names and hope they don't lose you on the ride. I got lost.
Towards the middle of the book I zoned out and literally missed a character's death which somehow did not change much to my understanding.

Thank you to the author and Netgalley for the ARC, I'm sorry to not have liked this book more :(.

🪱 ARC REVIEW 🪱

NAMELESS THINGS by Ernest Jensen
3/5 🌟
Pub date - Mar 11th

The concept for this book was really cool, but the characters' choices in this book were questionable at best. I'm also not sure if the main character was likeable, I was divided on him.

This book starts with our main character, Mike, going on a hiking trip with his buddy. They see a meteor hit, and hell follows.

Please read if you like the following:

🪱Survival situations with strangers relying on each other
🪱 The movie "THE THING"
🪱 Rock climbing
🪱 Alien worms

Thank you Netgalley and Dreamscape Media for this ARC

First of all, this wasn't bad. It just didn't root for me. The story was fine but just kind of skated on the surface and didn't go any deeper. The writing was ok for a debut. I don't know, it just never gelled for me but was perfectly serviceable for entertaining me while I cleaned out the garage.

I hate to say it, but this was just not good. The premise was intriguing, but I really struggled with the stilted dialogue and very repetitive nature of the book. The writing felt very juvenile. There were a lot of events that were included for shock value, but not much else. The dog diarrhea near the end of the book was just nonsense. The only redeeming part of the story was the unexpected ending!

Sadly, the narration did not add anything to the story. If anything, I think the narration made it even cringier! This is not an audiobook I can recommend. There was some promise, but it really missed the mark for me.

The horror aspects really appealed to me, but the characters and the writing felt so underdeveloped that it was difficult to really connect with the story.
I enjoyed the narrators voice, but at some points I had to really focus on not letting my mind wander, so sometimes it just became white noise in the background.

I really wanted to like this, because I love horror, but this just unfortunately didn't meet the mark

The premise for this book sounds wonderful, a killer in the woods, taking out young people. And parts of the story are really very good, but the author failed to use dialogue that was convincing. As many other reviewers have noted, this reads more like a YA horror story then an adult book.

This has the vibe of a random b-horror film you'd find on Tubi at 2 a.m. It's not a bad watch but it's also not something you're going to remember next week. The writing felt very VERY juvenile and the audiobook narrator didn't help, a lot of dialog felt like it would be coming from a young teenage boy instead of a man in his 30s. At one point the words "knuckle sandwich" were said and yeah... The non-stop banter regardless of the situation was tiresome. Honestly, this could have worked as a young adult horror novel. It was repetitive and focused too much on small things, someone died and all you can talk about is your lack of sleep over and over? Coffee? Do you want to talk about coffee AGAIN? The characters were all pretty hollow, and interchangeable. The body horror was the best part, some great visuals. Wish there'd been more of a focus on it.

If you want a quick little horror read that doesn't have much substance this is the book for you.

Thank you to Dreamscape Media for this gifted ALC.

I tried. I really tried. I made the mistake of reading the reviews before I started this audiobook, and that is out of the norm for me because early reviews usually skew my opinion. But this book was not for me. I can’t tell if it was the narrator or if it was the storytelling, but it was just not the greatest. It had potential. It really did. But I could not mesh or gel with it.

I really wanted to love this story, but it ended up feeling like a weaker, less refined version of The Troop by Nick Cutter. The premise had potential, but the execution fell flat—mainly due to the writing, which felt immature and often undercut the horror elements rather than enhancing them. The scares lacked the tension and atmosphere needed to be truly effective, making the story feel more juvenile than unsettling. While it didn’t work for me, I hope others connect with it more than I did!

Fast paced. The author does a great job at keeping the story going. There were no lulls or fluff.
As for the story, it was a mix of Tremors, Slither, and The Road. The tone of the book had some hard shifts. It started off as horror, evolved into a drama, crossed over into a sort of light-hearted comedy, and finally back to horror. I love a book that can mix all of those moods and still keep the same overarching tone throughout. This one missed. The shifts were a bit distracting, but overall, the book was still entertaining.
Thank you for the opportunity to read this one early!!!