Nick Cutter writes scary scary books. I loved this latest one by him. Cults are scary. This book will keep you awake with the lights on. Reading fast to the end.

This story uses flashbacks to build tension as you learn about three bounty hunters who have to stop trying to kill each other so they can figure out what's going on in "Little Heaven".

There is a lot of creepy/gross goodness to enjoy in this story. I would have liked a little more character development to round out my concern for our trio, but the action packed last third of the story was quite compelling. It definitely had the "old school" horror feel.

I'm not sure there's a Nick Cutter book I don't like. Each has its own level of creepy and disturbing.

Little Heaven was a horror involving cults and demons. It flashed from the 80’s back to the 60’s as the horror returned and the 3 unlikely partners ended up back in Little Heaven later in life. We weren’t sure as readers what happened the first time, so the majority of the book took place in the past, their first run in with Little Heaven.

I loved the beginning as the 3 mercenaries joined forces to once again tackle the evil they discovered so many years before. I enjoyed watching them discover the cult and figure it out, but that’s kind of where my enjoyment fizzled out a bit.

The stuff was super horrific, there’s no doubt about that, but I didn’t truly connect with Ellen or her quest to save her nephew and I felt I would’ve preferred a better POV from someone in the cult watching it unfold. We got a few bits from some of the people, but none of them were set up as the major players and so there was little connection for me.

The whispering and the bugs definitely creeped me out, though. I recommend the book for horror fans, I’m just used to getting so much description about the characters in a horror book thanks to Stephen King that I just felt it could have used a bit more of that to really draw me in.

Fantastic epic horror third novel by Nick Cutter. Highly recommended.

I love everything Nick Cutter writes. This was no exception. He builds the dread slowly and then WHAM hits you. I'll read anything this man writes.

I love everything by Nick Cutter and this book was no exception. Was I grossed out constantly? Yes. Was it amazing at the same time? Yes. I had no idea what I was getting into when I starting reading, but I think that just made it even better.

Little Heaven
By Nick Cutter

Why, why, why, does someone like me, who is terrified of horror movies and books, keep choosing these books from NetGalley? To be fair, I have not chosen a lot of them, and they all have one commonality — they were all written by Nick Cutter (or Craig Davidson, who uses this name as a pseudonym.) I don't know what it is about these books, but I've said it before (here) and (here), I just find Cutter's writing completely compelling. This time, I didn't even tell my husband about it, I just went ahead and read it without the horror-shaming that usually comes first. And guess what? I loved this one too, more than The Deep, and a teensy-bit less than The Troop. Maybe next time I'll try a Davidson book, so I won't have to sleep with the lights on for a week after I finish.

Honestly, that's all I'm going to say about this, you don't need anything else from me. Get the book and read it for yourself. You will not be disappointed. Freaked out, confused and sleepless, but definitely not disappointed.



For Goodreads:

Why I picked it — Because Nick Cutter wrote it.
Reminded me of… Year of Wonders, The Troop.
For my full review — click here

In New Mexico, a trio of mismatched mercenaries is hired by a woman to rescue her nephew from what she fears is a cult her brother-in-law has joined. Seems simple enough, but there's no way for them to know the supernatural horror really waiting for them.

I love supernatural horror, so I was excited to get this to review, but I have to admit, it took me a bit to get into it. It jumps from the 1960's to a more recent time and back quite often, and I wasn't initially getting into the characters.

But about halfway in, it started all connecting and turned into a fascinating read.

The story became very creepy once the body count in the camp started piling up. Then we learn what the supernatural entity is and how it functions and those descriptive encounters will stay with you for a while.

If you want a chilling story and are willing to let it slowly build until it finally grabs you and you stay up determined to finish it, check out Little Heaven by Nick Cutter.

I would give this more stars...except I happen to have read Stephen King's IT. The premise and structure of Little Heaven is *so* similar to IT that it's distracting: a monster/demon that wants children, a cast of outsider characters that battle this monster/demon twice with a stretch of time in the middle, shape-shifting to lure/frighten people, etc.

There's also a similarity between the Reverend and Michael Crichton's character John Hammond from Jurassic Park: their desire to create something spectacular, the way their creation takes on power beyond their control, and especially the way their stories end (death by compy's, anyone?).

I did some research into the other reviews of this book and into the promotional interviews that Cutter did -- the reviewers basically all say, "This is totally like It!" and Cutter himself said it was his favorite book by King, but when interviewed, he said that it's "tough to know where ideas come from," and that "The whole “It’s like book X and Y” game is something publishers do, because they have to. Part of the game. I’m not sure we writers are always overjoyed to have to exist under that kind of comparative ceiling. But Little Heaven is a bigger book; it’s one where I tried to stretch myself and do something a little different. I am proud of it, and happy with what it says and does, walks and talks. But readers are going to come to their own opinions, as readers do."

His interviewer (Paul Semel) calls attention to the fact that when you center everything around a "weird black monolith," people are going to think of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Cutter said, "I’m gonna be honest and say I’ve never seen that film. I mean, I know what the monolith is, I’ve seen YouTube clips or whatever, the soaring score, and the “It’s full of stars” line, but never the movie itself. So I’m not certain what the monolith in that film represents."

(Link to the full interview, if anyone is interested: http://paulsemel.com/exclusive-interv...)

In and of themselves, these things don't detract from how
Little Heaven reads and resonates. There's a gorgeous paragraph toward the end about giving love away because it makes us fully human, and another about the cowardice of evil. There's a fantastic idea that runs through the story about what we owe to others when we commit evil deeds (or sin, depending on how you want to look at it).

But I felt that Cutter relied too much on inspiration from and homages to other works (another Semel brings up is No Country For Old Men) rather than building on the themes and ideas mentioned above. Which is a shame. Little Heaven would be a tremendous standalone work if it really trusted itself to stand alone.

Little Heaven by Nick Cutter is what a horror novel once was and should always be. It is what was written before the teenage romance readers and writers got a hold of the genre and weakened it. There is darkness, there is horror and there is a hopelessness that infects all the characters. They are damned and redeemed and in their redemption must pay the price for their sins.. There are no heroes here. There are only cast of characters whose sins are faced off against a greater evil. An evil they could not have every been prepared for. This has been called old school horror but that is wrong, unless it can be considered old school just because there is no safe place to shield you in this book.

"...You really think we'll have to blast our way out of here?' said Ellen. 'Have things gotten that nuts?'
Things can get nuts pretty fast, Micah thought. He knew it. He'd seen it.
Minerva said, 'There's something else in these woods.'
Everyone looked at her. A flush crept up her throat.
'Just something hostile,' she went on, undeterred. 'I felt it the other night, searching for the boy. A million eyes scuttling over my skin. I don't care if that sounds stupid. Maybe I'm going a little nuts myself.' She stared at them, her jaw fixed tight. 'This fucking place.'
Nobody disputed her sense of things..."

Three mercenaries, one time enemies, but now working together take a simple job. Go with a woman to check on her nephew, who was taken by his father to a remote, religious settlement in New Mexico known as Little Heaven. Micah Shughrue, Minerva Atwater, and Ebenezer Elkins escort Ellen Bellhaven into New Mexico to see how her nephew is doing. But soon after they arrive they begin to realize that nothing is what it seems in this secluded community. The settlers are paranoid of outsiders and worse, their children are beginning to go missing. The people of Little Heaven know that there is something old and dark in the woods surrounding their settlement. There is something that is beginning to call out to them from the woods, something that is encroaching on their world.

"...The thing was more interested in Otis. He'd stopped screaming, now face to face with it. Otis' lips trembled as he called out, oh so weakly, for his God.
The the thing attacked. Otis might as well have walked into a garbage disposal. His face was shredded, legs jittering crazily as he was torn to bits. Blood burst forth and sheeted down, a veritable waterfall of the red stuff splattering Micah's face..."

I have read Nick Cutter before. I was not overly impressed as the rest of the world seemed to be with The Troop but I absolutely loved The Deep. Yes there were a thousand things wrong with it but the tense atmosphere of the novel was the true promise of what was to come.

In Little Heaven, Cutter's scope and storytelling take major leaps forward. This is epic horror on the scale of some of King's best tales. As good as them, probably not but very much as ambitious. Little Heaven is a novel of evil on the human scale and then evil on a scale that goes beyond the reality of our world.

Cutter's ambition and reach would scare some young writers but in Little Heaven he delivers the goods.

This is horror. This is dark. This is redemption. This is hope.

This is on par with Joe Hill.

This is just that damn good.

Little Heaven is overall an amazing book!! It started really slow for me and jumped around a little in the beginning. It was hard to follow at first, but I was also really tired when I started the book. So it could have been me more than the book. Once I was about a quarter of the way into the book, I was totally hooked and didn't want to put it down. I don't want to go into the story since it could give to much of the plot away, but this is an intense horror/thriller book and it's well worth the read! Yes it is long, but it grabs you, pulls you in and takes you on an awesome ride!! Thank you very much to NetGalley and Gallery Books for the review copy!!

I love Nick Cutter. He is fast becoming one of my favorite horror writers. After reading “The Deep” and “The Troop” I had high expectations for “Little Heaven” and it did not disappoint. This book is fast paced, detailed, and terrifyingly fun. I will recommend to the horror loving patrons.

Little Heaven wasn't as good as Nick Cutter's other book The Troop, but it did have the horror and suspense it promised. Overall it was just ok and wasn't that memorable for me.

This book had just what I as looking for in the author's work. Gore, graphic, gore, surprises, gore. I feel that this book relied on themes from Stephen King so much, that that is why I gave it only three stars. It would have been more like 3.5. I like the twists and turns towards the middle/end of the book. The beginning was not my favorite part, and that is another reason for the lower rating. But, do not fret. I can be pretty tough on my horror./thrillers. This was a good book, but not the best I have read. The idea was awesome, and I look forward to more of the author's work.

Gallery Books and NetGalley provided me with an electronic copy of Little Heaven. This is my honest opinion of the book.

An unlikely trio of mercenaries, only hired to kill each other, end up working together in the fight of their lives. They are asked by Ellen Bellhaven to look in on and retrieve her nephew from Little Heaven, a religious cult to which his father has brought him. Trouble starts in the woods surrounding the compound and amplifies in the coming days. It is readily apparent that the cult is not exactly as it appears and the worsening situation has deadly implications. Will the trio have to make a deal with the devil to get out alive?

In the author's desire to let readers into the inner workings of his characters and their lives, he spent too much time getting to the central plot. Topping out at almost 500 pages, I had to struggle mightily to slog through some of it. Because the book was written out of sequential order, readers are left to puzzle out the characters' motivations for their actions throughout most of the story. By the end, when readers are finally privy to the details, it is beyond the point of caring. Little Heaven does have some well written moments of horror, which would have come through more strongly with a more streamlined plot. In a lot of ways, this book feels like it was written in the tradition of Stephen King, which may be why I found it a bit disappointing. The premise, the characters, and the story had great promise, but Little Heaven fell a bit short for me.

This book took a long time to get going and as it did i realised id read all of this before. This is just a very unoriginal idea taken from many different famous horror characters and made into one. Its boring and massively lacks originality. Shame.

I’ve been telling people that Nick Cutter’s new horror epic Little Heaven reads as though Cormac McCarthy was inspired to write a horror novel after reading Stephen King’s It, and while that seems like I’m being hyperbolic, I assure you, that’s not the case. Little Heaven finds Cutter mimicking McCarthy’s voice in many ways – including old-fashioned, uncontracted dialogue, baroque descriptions, and more – but also aping the master’s content. Because in no small way, Little Heaven feels like a neo-Western, the story of three hired guns who get brought in to rescue a boy in distress from a hostile compound, only to end up far out of their depth as horrors emerge. The fact that the book takes place in the 1960’s and 80’s is irrelevant; this feels like the story of hard men (and women) on the verge of normal civilization. More than that, as is the case so often with McCarthy, these characters live in a morally complex world, one governed by violence, their own internal codes, and their own bleak, vicious worldviews.

And yet, there’s no denying the influence of It on Little Heaven either. Taking place across two time periods, Cutter cuts back and forth between the two. He opens in the 1980’s, years after these gunfighters’ initial confrontation with some imaginable evil, only to find that evil awakening again and coming back for them. Even early on, though, Cutter shows that he’s doing something different with the story, hinting that our characters didn’t just gain nightmares and trauma from that 1960’s encounter; they’ve gained something awful, some Faustian deal that’s hurt them more than helped. And as Cutter begins to dive into the story of what happened in the 1960’s – the effort to rescue a young boy from a religious compound run by an increasingly paranoid preacher – we start to see that this isn’t only a story about supernatural evil, but about the evil within men, as well.

Ultimately, that’s the answer to the fact of what makes Little Heaven so good, and so rich. If all the book did was ape It or McCarthy, it might be fun, but it wouldn’t be as phenomenal as Little Heaven is. Instead, Cutter’s story plunges us deeper and deeper into madness, slowly increasing the level of horror around the characters and never letting up. More than that, though, he spends as much time in the head of his human villains as he does our heroes, turning the story into something more disturbing than it might be otherwise. Is this a tale of a religious cult corrupted by a primal evil, or about an evil man who crosses an unspeakable line? It’s hard to know which would be less disturbing, and to Cutter’s credit, he doesn’t give us an easy answer.

Because, yes, this religious compound in the woods is surrounded by something dark, malevolent, and unspeakable. But what’s going on the compound itself is no less horrific, as children begin disappearing, and people turn the other way, never wanting to acknowledge what’s happening. Whether that’s because they’re blinded by faith, or something supernatural, doesn’t matter; what matters is that it happens. It says more than a little bit that it’s hard to know what Cutter’s most horrific creation is: the shapeshifting, surreal horrors in the woods, or the disturbed villains we keep seeing…or even our heroes themselves, whose lives of violence and brutality are part of their lives.

Cutter is known as a brutal, go-for-broke horror writer, and Little Heaven is no exception to that rule; this is surreal, disturbing, and truly scary, and that’s before we get to how black-hearted and upsetting the core of the book is. More than that, Cutter follows his dark story to its logical conclusion, giving us darker deeds than even Pennywise managed, and making his heroes more complicit and less of a symbol of good. Combining that with the horrific end of the Little Heaven compound, and the result is a horror novel that gets not only under your skin, but may viscerally upset you in no small way. And for me to say that about a horror novel…well, that’s no small feat.

Here’s the final verdict: this is a searing, vicious, brutal horror novel, one that marries McCarthy’s stark prose and world with an ambitious, strange story of evil, sacrifice, and faith. And, yes, it owes much to its inspirations…but it also stands on its own, turning those inspirations into something new, something more than the sum of their parts, and creating something visceral and effective. It won’t be for all tastes – it’s wonderfully literate and careful, and too extreme for many – but for those on board with its efforts, they’ll be rewarded and then some.

Little Heaven is my first Nick Cutter book, but it won't be the last - - this man knows how to write horror! Three badass bounty hunters who squared off against an ancient evil in the past are reluctantly reunited to rescue a young boy from a religious cult. If you're guessing they're going to revisit more than old relationships, you're right. But Cutter has a great many more twists and turns, all of then geared toward inducing the reader to keep the lights on and avoid the woods for years to come!