The Basic Book Bitches

Review by Emily

This was my first novel by Gage Greenwood and I thought it was pretty good and I would absolutely read more of his books. I was able to read this book before its publishing date thanks to Netgalley.

For me, this was a quick and easy read. There were some sort of tough-to-get-through points where the plot was slow and the characters a bit bland but once I powered through those it was pretty good. Along that same vein, there were aspects of the plot that felt neglected, and this did cause the book at times to feel a bit inauthentic in some of the situations. An example is Chapter 36, which gives the Langblass history through a secondary character, which felt a bit awkward and like it was an afterthought. I also wonder why the Langblass were so set on killing Tiffany and Doug as they weren’t from one of the family lines that promised sacrifices to the Langblass.

This book opens up with a scene that grabs you and pulls you in with the family, (a recently widowed father and his five children), playing a game in their new house. Suddenly, something goes awry and the oldest daughter, Wreath, is eaten alive by a monster while the rest of the family stands by watching in horror. The police don’t believe the family’s story and this eventually causes them to become ostracized by not only their community but with each other as well.

Jackson, who is the absentee father of the group, ends up becoming an alcoholic after his daughter’s death and leaving his children to whatever fate they’ll come to. I despised Jackson’s character for the way he treated his children, although I understand the role he was playing in the overall story. Brian, the oldest son, wasn’t around for long. He had a raging drug problem and unfortunately ended up overdosing. One of my favorite characters in the book was Charlie, which was pretty disappointing since he ended up disappearing pretty early in the book. Angie and Chrissy were bitchy middle school girls whose characters I thought were kind of meh, and their arcs were kind of a letdown.

Outside of the main family group we had Charlie’s friends, Tiffany, and her brother, Doug, whom he met at the beach looking out at Block Island one night. Tiffany and Doug were interesting characters in the sense that they only wanted to be friends with Charlie and there weren’t any underlying motivations such as bullying or romance in their interactions. The friendship was nice, and eventually heartbreaking when Charlie was begging the monster not to kill him since he had friends now. I will say that having Charlie’s friends survive while he did not was a bit disappointing.

While this was a “horror” novel the monster was a bit dull. The Langblass had allegedly been brought over on a ship from the Black Forest in Germany. Tall, ghastly creatures with long claws and a vendetta against the Keating family and their new friends after the kids travel back to Block Island for closure. These creatures are brutal. I was disappointed, however, that these creatures didn’t actually draw from German folklore as the book said they did, but instead seemed to be purely the author’s creation.

While the Langblass were the physical monsters in this book it was another monster who I felt took center stage and was overall more unsettling and frightening. For me, the overwhelming terror of this book came from how grief can destroy lives in so many different ways. Each of the characters in this book experienced and coped with grief differently and eventually allowed it to win. And even at the end of the novel, we see that for the remaining characters grief is still in control, even though they escaped with their lives.