(I rarely do if it looks like each one will end on a cliffie. I would continue the series to see how those things develop if I could find a copy at a library, borrow one, or find a freebie. So, for a lot of the time, I was waiting, waiting, waiting. But I felt like they all got held until about the last 1/3 of the book. But there are obviously some more interesting things happening in the wings that will come up in future books. I spent a lot of this book waiting for it to grab my attention. I’m tired of what it tells me we’ve all internalized about other women and ourselves. Can we let this jealous girl villain-which has to be one of the most over-used in all of romance-dies already? I’m tired of reading it. Her main foil, for example, is a girl who is jealous because the boy she likes is paying attention to the main character. It just got hard to take the chuckle-heads seriously enough to be true bad-boy romantic leads.Īdd to that the fact that most of the tension in the book comes from campus bullies-the college campus feels a little too like a high school, really-and I found it all just a little too cliched. They do very little in the grand scheme of things, honestly.Īnd while I thought them funny (and Ivery much appreciated how low-angst the why choose aspect was between them), I also thought they were idiots. They’re violently inclined, sure, but she is constantly telling them not to be and stopping them.

Then, the blurb tells us they “bludgeon, maim, eviscerate-tear a strip of havoc right through this sleepy town.” They do no such thing. Instead, the ghosts just possess the main character’s bullies. So, I expected something at least a little monster-like. Sure, the blurb says afterlife, but the title says ghouls. But…’Meh.’ I thought this was entertaining enough but ultimately disappointing.įirst off, the blurb set my expectation of the ‘Gang of Ghouls’ high.

The writing and editing are perfectly competent. But what if the only way to set things right is to get a little ghoulish? I promised myself I’d stick to the straight and narrow from here on.

And that’s not the only strangeness stirring inside me… In ways very different from how I felt as a kid.

Maybe I’m still not all that sane either, because part of me finds them strangely appealing. So they’ll bludgeon, maim, eviscerate-tear a strip of havoc right through this sleepy town. They’re crude, criminally inclined, and more than a little unstable after ages trapped in afterlife limbo. The four “imaginary” friends who made my childhood bearable barge into my life in a very real way. Horrible enough that my little sister won’t even speak to me.īut when I’m released back into a town determined to rub my unknown sins in my face, the past isn’t the only thing that’s haunting me. Thanks to a blank in my memory, I’m not sure what that thing was, but it was horrible enough to get me locked up in the mental ward for seven years. I purchased a copy of Eva Chase‘s The Stalking Dead.

The Stalking Dead by Eva Chase