Chills by Mary SanGiovanni

Chills by Mary SanGiovanni, Horror Fiction

It begins with a freak snowstorm in May. Hit hardest is the rural town of Colby, Connecticut. Schools and businesses are closed, powerlines are down, and police detective Jack Glazier has found a body in the snow. It appears to be the victim of a bizarre ritual murder. It won't be the last. As the snow piles up, so do the sacrifices. Cut off from the rest of the world, Glazier teams up with an occult crime specialist to uncover a secret society hiding in their midst.

The gods they worship are unthinkable. The powers they summon are unstoppable. And the things they will do to the good people of Colby are utterly, horribly unspeakable…

3 out of 5, here's why:

*I received an ARC from Netgalley with an unspoken promise to pen a review. Here it is.

Investigators are attempting to figure out who left a dead body with a strange occult marking lying around just as an unseasonable snow storm starts moving in. This isn’t just any old winter storm either. This storm brings with it man-eating monsters!

The writer had me at flesh eating monsters but I have to admit that she lost me a bit somewhere along the way and this book started to drag. It could simply be me and my aversion to books that feature all action at the expense of character building. In my opinion, only Kathy, the occult specialist, was fleshed out well in this story. Her back story and her brother’s past were interesting but the rest of the people were nothing more than fodder for the monsters or an interchangeable mix of men trying to figure out the cultish case. That made sticking to this material a very hard thing for me to do.

I’m not going to lie though. The whole scenario she sets up here is quite terrifying. The monsters don’t pick and choose their prey. They eat every living human in their path and some of the scenes are riveting early on. You’ve been warned!

This is a well written action-packed, gory monster tale and now that I’ve finished, I completely understand the mixed reviews. It’s going to come down to a matter of what you like and what you don’t. If action is your thing you are going to love this lot more than I did.

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