Horribly executed premise is too convoluted for its own good.

omg the art in this book is so beautiful. some brutal moments involving hatchets though, so fair warning

Hated the Alex storyline, though the Green Man stuff was cool. Really liked the beginning, middle dragged on for me because of the diary, second to last 100 pages were great, and the last hundred pages made no sense and should be Fahrenheit 451'd out of existence. Decent book overall.

Don't know what y'all are talking about, but it's a perfectly passable mystery. Nothing super interesting so far, but still good.
UPDATE: still not as good as the hype, but slowly getting more interesting. I am intrigued to see where Flynn will go with the Angie subplot.
UPDATE: Book went from 3 stars to 5 in a *heartbeat* with the beginning of Part 2.

It's very generic but not bad.

Mid.

Think some plot points should have been wrapped up

Ew. Ew ew ew ew ew ew ew.
This book had no beginning, no ending and nothing of value in the middle. In fact, the only thing that actually happened in it was the discussion at the bar about the toe thing and that was so unbelievably graphic to the point where it was completely needless. Yes, it fits in with the theme (or lack thereof) of the book but if you try to tell a story about censors and then completely ignore what they're actually censoring, only deciding midway to graphically describe one of the videos, it's not gonna work.

I think the most shocking part about this book is how much I wasn’t invested in the story or characters.

Throughout the entire book I was thinking "this is a novel known for its amazing twist. how can I guess it?". I can predict nearly every twist in various forms of media but THIS ONE. HOLY CRAP.

Armitage84 was not the imposter

#justiceforsimon

Pretty creepy nonlinear story that begins to come together right at the end… and then the book just comes to an end. Every story was very creepy but was also extremely short that didn’t allow the vignette to actually develop anything. Still, lots of potential and nightmarish imagery.

The personification of the phrase ‘utterly mid’.

Very gory book that wild work better as a film but is still great. Arthouse horror in book form.


[Trigger Warnings below]
Lots of dog death that is very gruesomely described.

The movie was meh but even that was better than this.

Heathers meets Midsommar.

Junji Ito for those with a short attention span.
Terrifying imagery in stories not long enough to deserve any payoff, very generic if not for the art.

Pearl made me love this book.
No.
Pearl made me *want* to love this book.

Nobody is getting any context, read this surreal masterpiece of horror fiction.

Everything related to The Navidson Record was genuinely unsettling and fantastic but the concept and writing of the book deserved better than what we got with the other parts.

When Alice Feeney described this book as an homage to "And Then There Were None" I didn't realize that she didn't mean homage, she meant that the entire goddamn story was going to be copied from it. The book itself has three 'twists', if you can even call them that - one that was extremely obvious and two of the most fucking stupid twists ever written in a book or movie. I'm giving it 0.75 of a star simply because the edition of the book that I read had a nice cover.

Nice art. Wish there was some plot

I have read this book 4 times since it’s release and I’m disappointed that it does not hold up. The main problem is it’s over reliance on unfunny humor that tries to appeal to Gen Z too much, which does not work.

A college student tries to steal and eventually falls in love with a sex doll. This happens four times. Not the main storyline but one of the only memorable moments in the book, for the wrong reasons.

While I’m sure the anime series is great, the book was very repetitive, and while I’m sure that’s what the author was going for, it does not work. While the point of the book is to show the same story happening across multiple parallel universes, these universes are not different from each other, with the second and third tale being borderline identical. The writing is great but the book quickly begins to get lost in its own loop that it created for itself.

Two teenagers bang underwater.
Oh yeah, some cool cosmic horror stuff thrown in there as well.

Fast paced cozy murder mystery drags on a bit too much but is still worth a read.

Meh. The idea behind it started out interesting and then completely fell flat with everything related to the energy spheres. The sphere plot could have worked if the book was longer but because only 4 out of 6 chapters were focused on it, it had no time at all to develop. The subject matter of suicide was also handled without much care.

I would rate this 0 stars if I could.
Absolutely god-awful writing, characters, pacing and plot. By far the worst book of this year and it's not even a contest.
And that's not even bringing up the fact that this book is extremely sexist towards men, portraying them as cartoonish villains and having the main cast of characters slowly and brutally murder literally every single male character in the book.

Opening was one of the most unsettling things I’ve ever read, so it was a shame that it had nothing to do with the rest of the story, which went on way to long for a not interesting plot with a crappy explanation.

Really sad but don't read the back, as the blurb gives away a reveal later on.