Kin by Kealan Patrick Burke[/caption]In the middle of the night, my Husband woke to blood-curdling screams coming from my side of the bed. He found me thrashing and shrieking like I was being attacked by some invisible assailant. He shook me awake – or so he thought – and I sat up in bed.
“It’s you!” I gasped at him in an unconscious epiphany that he was secretly behind whatever torture I’d been enduring. Then I went back to sleep.
While I didn’t recall the dream or our interaction, I had a promising lead glaring at me from the nightstand. It was my Kindle, stopped about 30-40 pages into Kin which I began reading mere hours before the incident.
For a horror fan like me, it was a promising start.
The book begins straight of an ending from hellbilly slasher flicks like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes. The girl who escaped Them wanders vacantly down a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. She’s covered in blood, missing digits, and an empty socket gapes where an eye used to be. The emotional trauma was worse. She saw what They did to her friends – what They were going to do to her. She’s about to succumb to her injuries when a passing truck stops and picks her up.
In stereotypical horror land, this is the part where the truck takes her back to Them or the story flashes back to the beginning with four cocky, care-free college students who decide to take a “shortcut” or camp in the woods near the finest mutant cannibals Appalachia America has to offer.
But not this story.
The plot doesn’t center on that opening scene, rather the scene acts as a catalyst for multiple plots engaging a wide range of characters all responding to the incident for their own reasons. There’s Finch, the hot-headed military vet seeking justice for his brother; Peter, the son who helped his now-dead father pick up the wounded girl; Luke, the son brainwashed by years of abuse from his fanatical father and mother; Papa-in-Grey, the patriarch of the Merrill clan on a quest to do His work and protect their family from the poisonous Men of the World; Claire, the only surviving victim of the Merrill’s.
That’s just naming a few.
Looking for a cut-and-dry horror plot? Look elsewhere. Kin’s plot progresses through each character’s point of view – influenced by their biases and flaws – rather than a start-to-finish retelling of events. Right or wrong and good or bad aren’t easily defined and the author leaves it up to the reader to make that judgment.
The character depth was one of the things I enjoyed most out of the book. There were so many characters, yet the author managed to dig deeper into each of them – a feat often unsuccessful by other authors and in books with fewer characters.
With that said, the amount of character depth had its drawbacks. The changing points of view retold the story offering different insight to the events, but it also moved the plot along at a snail’s pace. In the second half of the book, I felt impatient for something to happen. Less talk. More action.
And for the reasons I just stated, the ending was a little disappointing. It wasn’t the way it ended, but the fact that it went by too quickly to enjoy. It was like spending all day preparing a gourmet dinner and then hoovering it in 30 seconds. I would've liked to savor the ending of such a delicious book.
Recommended For: Fans of horror novels that don’t mind a little gore (it’s not that bad)
Not Recommended For: Weak stomachs, those looking for a fast-paced plot, those who live in remote forest areas.
FINE PRINT YO! Unless otherwise noted, the opinions expressed in these reviews are my own and not influenced by financial reward (in the form of money or free $h!t) or the Order of the Phoenix. They may, however, be influenced by vodka and shiny. If you have a book you’d like me to review, please contact me.
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