 Hello everybody, E here, welcome back to another book review. Today we are talking about The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon. This was a buddy read with my good friend Angie. Overall for the TDLR crowd, I liked it. I liked it a lot. Some really really creepy scenes in here. What I appreciated the most was, in fact, I'm going to go ahead and read this on the back from USA Today. It says, crisp, mysterious and scary, reminiscent of Stephen King. CJ Tudor, the author of The Chalkman, gets a lot of crap because basically she rewrote in The Chalkman. There's a cemetery scene. There's a graveyard scene. That's almost exactly like the Pet Cemetery graveyard funeral scene, and from what I understand is her new book is just another knockoff of Pet Cemetery. This book is, what I would say, is almost a tribute done right. I don't know that Jennifer McMahon is a Stephen King fan if she's even read or read Pet Cemetery or seen the movies. I don't know, but this is definitely a take on that concept, burying things and bringing them back to life. I don't think that's too much of a spoiler. The winter people, the whole concept behind the winter people is creepy by itself, but there's a certain thing in here about skin that really, really bothered me. It's kind of like in The Shining, when he doesn't really show the action of the topiary animals, the hedge animals. He doesn't show the action of them, but it's implied, and there is a story within a story in this one that really creeped me out. I could see it so well, and it's explained away toward the end of the book, which I didn't like. But anyways, the idea behind that was just so disturbing to me, and there were several scenes in this book that really got under my skin. I enjoyed quite a bit. Now there are some things like, there's some blurbs in here that say emotional depth of characters and whatnot. I didn't get that too much. I had a really good horror time with this book, but it's not as heavy literary as it is that I tend to enjoy. The writing is fine, it's great, it's serviceable. What I liked the most about the book was the storytelling. The pacing was terrific. The back and forth between present day and past that was done really, really well. Even some things that came off that made it seem like they were spoilers for what happened in the past, or what would happen in the future, ended up twisting and turning, and I had an all around good time. I will say toward the end of the book, there was a reveal that, the reveal wasn't bad. It was the dialogue that was carried over that made me, it was a very, you know, it was a dick dastardly, yeah, I was smarter than you see. It was, the dialogue still making me laugh, thinking back to it, and it's a huge spoiler so I'm not going to talk about what, who said it or any of that, but it kind of ruined my enjoyment of the ending. I didn't care much for the ending and also once again it's like Stephen King in that regard where it doesn't have a really good ending. There was something that I was hoping for, probably because Victor Laval went all out with the changeling and he normally does with his books. I was hoping Jennifer McMahon would take, you know, would go that extra mile there at the end, but at the end most of the action happened off screen if I'm honest and I was rather upset by that. So I'm going to give this a strong four stars, probably more like 4.5 and the main reason for that is because the ending just kind of petered out for me. Other than that, it's a terrific read and I'm looking forward to reading anything else by her. I don't know if I would try her other thrillers because I didn't like the thriller aspects of this one. I enjoyed the horror aspects and she's just a really, really sound writer. Now I don't know if this is considered literary horror. It didn't read that way. I didn't catch any themes like the grip of it is definitely literary horror, but this one was more, I don't know, it's more Stephen King than it is Peter Straub if you know what I mean, but it's also not to the character level of Stephen King. There's a lot of characters in here that are just kind of there, I mean honestly. I didn't get a good feel for, there's one character in particular that kind of did nothing for me and that was Candace. She's important to the story, but her story arc didn't really go anywhere whatsoever and I didn't feel that she was anything beyond the surface level and I felt that way about probably Catherine too. In fact most people, that's how I felt that they were just kind of characters in a story and they were not real people. As I'm talking about this, I'm realizing more and more that yeah, I didn't care too much for any of the characters and it's not because they were unlikable characters, that would have been fine. But there really wasn't too much to like or care about other than the main situation which is Ruthie and Fawn's parents, I think that's actually on the back, hang on let me make sure, yeah, it's on the back, her mother Ruthie and Fawn's mother goes missing and that's really all you have to care about with them. There's a throwaway love interest named Buzz and yeah, I mean the story, like I said, again and I'm not making a good argument for the 4.5 stars anymore but really the story is so good that I'm willing to ignore, the more I think about it, I'm willing to ignore the lackluster characters. So have you read The Winter People? Let me know down there in the comments below. Again, I enjoyed it, 4.5 stars, I enjoyed the story, sometimes you just have to ignore all the rest of the stuff and enjoy the story, right? I guess that's what happened to me here but until next time, I have an E, you have an U, it's been another book review, I'll talk to you guys later, bye bye. I had to change hats for the outro but the, I don't know man, yeah the characters, I just think nothing really came of it and then Candace, by the way this is spoiler time, spoilers after the outro, I kind of, I don't know, her death happening off screen and we never got to actually see, you know, the, I guess demon-girty in action, that kind of upset me, it really got me and of course what I was talking about is Aunty's monologue at the end, like a damn Bond villain, that I was actually laughing through that entire scene because it's just so bad, if I wish, I wish I had made note of where it was in the book so I could go back and read it to you, it was so, so bad and the rest, and the only reason it was so bad is because the rest of the book was so good, you know, and I've heard, you know, I've heard Stephen King saying in an interview, sometimes you have to read, you have to read a book for a story, sometimes you read the book for the language, this is definitely, you know, one of those things where you read the book, where I read the book for the story, I had a blast, so it's a good writing, I actually don't know, it was definitely serviceable, I had a lot of fun with it, but, and I had, especially had fun with you, Angie, if you continue to watch this, I had a blast and I'm definitely gonna check out more of her work, it's kind of like the Nelson DeMille, you know, thing, almost like a guilty pleasure, I don't think the writing of the characters were all that good, but man, that story was, was hella awesome.