Russell Holbrook's The Water Babies by Russell HolbrookMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
Six teenagers go camping next to a bridge reputedly haunted by two mutant feral childern. Will any of them come back alive?
I had high hopes for this. It did not come close to meeting them.
The setup for this book was great. Civil war soldiers drown two kids after raping their mother and they haunt the scene of their death, killing and devouring anyone dumb enough to venture near at night. Sounds good, right?
Well, it wasn't. The book reads like a hybrid of gore horror and monster porn. The book didn't feel like it knew what it wanted to be. I was tired of the weird dream sequences after the first one.
The characters were pretty wooden and fairly unrealistic, like B-movie characters but not in a good or entertaining way. The story focused more on sex than horror. By the time the guy asked his girlfriend to pee on him, I was done expecting things to turn around and just waited for it to be over.
If this book wasn't so short, I wouldn't have finished it. As much as I hate to drop a negative review, the best things about this book were the cover and the initial setup. I think an editor could have focused the good ideas into something workable. Water Babies could have been a good gore horror story or a passable monster porn story. As it stands, it's kind of a damn mess. One out of five stars.
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Its ever present danger reminded me of the core lings from the best writing service websites Warded Man at times. The woods can be a scary place when our by our self. Late night bus drivers are arming themselves secretly, the why's and how and should the laws be changed to allow this.
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