Krista is convinced her sister, Sadie, is possessed by a demon. It’s the only plausible explanation for how cold and distant she’s become since reaching high school. And it’s why Krista bought the strange book online: to destroy the demon and get her sister back.
But when their summoning ritual goes terribly right, Krista and Sadie realize too late that what they brought into the world hasn’t come to help.
Trapped in their apartment building with a horde of bloodthirsty monsters, the sisters need to fight to not only exorcise the demons slaughtering their friends and neighbors, but also the ones that drove the two of them apart.
This was my very first taste of J.E. Erickson’s mind and I must say, it was a blast. It was also a bit of a shocker, but I’ll get to that…
I will say, I truly wasn’t sure exactly where this was going for the first half. To be honest, it almost feels like a somewhat separate story from the second half, but with some of the same characters.
In the first half, we meet Krista and get a real hard look into her real hard life. Her mom’s terrible. Her sister’s terrible. Her classmates are terrible. The landlord is terrible. It’s almost a touch over the top, and I was trying to understand how it would lead to Hell belching up dust bunnies.
But then, at almost the exact halfway point of this slim novel, it starts to blend together.
And then, I must say, the second half? Grab yourself a diaper, hydrate, strap yourself in, and prepare for the ride. Because holy crap, it’s one hell of a ride. I read the entire back half in a single sitting, and it was fierce, it was vicious, and it was fun as hell.
So, two things I want to mention, one spoilery, one not so much. I’ll touch on the spoiler territory first, so you’ve been warned…
SPOILER (highlight to read…if you dare)
The first is probably my only complaint about the book as a whole. Erickson does such a phenomenal job of setting up the nasty mother, and the bully at school who seems to promise more fallout down the line, that I was a little disappointed there was no real payoff for either storyline. To be honest, I do believe the mom could have been virtually eliminated and only spoken about by the two sisters.
Regardless, I was expecting either the mom or the bully to show up at some point and either be hit with a stunning realization about Krista…or be hit with some hellish dust bunnies. Unfortunately, neither happened.
As I said, this was a minor complaint but, for me at least, it would have paid off some of the events of the front half of the novel a bit better.
END SPOILER
The second realization regarding this story was just how much it parallels huge chunks of the second book in my own Aphotic series, Out For Blood. And no, I’m not accusing Erickson of stealing anything. It’s just one of those weird, happy accidents where, somewhere along the lines, his muse and my muse were having a beer in a really seedy bar, and got to talking and bouncing around ideas.
Honestly, I found it really cool to see how another author would handle very similar circumstances, and how they wrote them. A couple were eerily similar. I just thought it was cool enough to mention.
Anyway, back to this book. This is absolutely a blast to read, and you really should read it.
It releases on October 1, 2023.
