Lewis Powell

A small group of outsiders in a Pacific Northwest town try to survive and fight back against a sudden onslaught of rage-and-violence that appears to be related to some new biotech being tested in the area.

I don’t read a ton of horror but as with horror movies, this isn’t because I dislike the genre, it’s because I have very particular things I want from horror and most horror isn’t doing that.

This book is pretty action-heavy and high gore. Neither of those things is bad, per se, but I am always looking for things that would be described as “atmospheric” and “tense”, which is just orthogonal to that at best.

Pros: I enjoyed the characters, and the story kept moving along at a good pace. The threat escalated nicely and felt ever present.

Cons: I read another review that said the motive was underexplained and I don’t think that’s true, but I do think it is unsatisfying and demystified a bit too much. All of our questions get answered, which sounds good, but ultimately, it would be good for this story to leave us with some questions to ponder.

Libby is integrated pretty well with kobo (a recent issue with duplicate downloads notwithstanding), which makes the tagging feature in the Libby app quite appealing, because my biggest issue with library checkouts is that sometimes I get a book out and the mood does not strike me to read that book during the window in which I have the book out. This has made me a less avid user of library checkouts than I would like, because I return too many books unread.

ebooks at least are low effort to checkout, and easy to return. But it is exciting for me to be able to mark books as “looked promising, try again later” and also to have the whole array of which books I have checked out browsable via tags. 

The biggest downsides are that I can’t link my university library to it, as far as I can tell, and that audiobooks and magazines don’t lend to my kobo for what I assume are very silly rights related reasons. I can borrow them to my phone though, and there is no real situation where I want to audiobook and my kobo would be workable but the phone wouldn’t. The magazines is a drag though!