 Hello everybody. E here. E here. Welcome back to another book review. Today we are talking about Devil's Creek by Todd Kiesling. This book comes out today, so happy book birthday to the book and to Todd. Up front I need to let you guys know that I consider Todd one of my friends that in no way has shifted this review. There is no bias here. I've reviewed friends in the past, acquaintances in the past and given them negative reviews. Some of them as low as one star. This is not that case. This book is fantastic. There's three things that I look for in a horror novel and that is character, dread and pacing with character that's in that order. I need there to be characters that I can care about or characters I can sympathize with or at the very least characters I can understand. Now as far as the dread comes in, I'm not a huge fan of gore, I'm really not a fan of gore for gore's sake. Violence and brutality is great, but if all you're doing is throwing blood guts and ass everywhere, I could care less. And the last one is pacing. You have to keep me interested. There has to be something going on at least every, I would say 10 pages and this book checks every single one of those boxes. There are already are and there are going to be loads of reviews that talk about how this harkens back, even in my review that I'm writing, harkens back to the heyday of small town horror. But what I'm going to refrain from doing is comparing Todd to other authors because this book is wholly, completely Todd's work. There are nods to several different authors. He even mentions a book, like I said, I'm not going to mention at all what his inspirations are. But he even mentions his inspirations in the last bit of the book. I think it's the acknowledgement section or the afterward, I'm not sure which one it is. He talks about where the book idea came from and all that or the inspiration is not really the book idea. But the reason for that, like I said, is because this is Todd's novel. This is unlike any other small town horror novel I've read in the past decade. And I'm going to go ahead and say this is the horror event of the past 10 years. I have not read a horror novel, especially not a small town horror novel that was this well thought out, this well paced with characters this good. I'm going to go into characters a little more here. Every single character, from the smallest one, like Skippy, for instance, when you read it, you know what I'm talking about. Every single one of these characters are fleshed out. So often in these books, what you get is you get one chapter from the person that's about to get killed. You have your main character or main characters. But then the people who die off throughout the book, you get one chapter of development. That's it. And in that same chapter, they usually ended up being killed by the end of it. That's not the case here. Every single character, and I am in awe. I am shocked. Sorry, Todd, that has no bearing on you as an author. I haven't read a book, a horror novel, this good in a long time. The characters, I want to stress this, the characters are amazing. They're in-depth. Each one has their own lives. You come to care about certain people and that just makes what happens to them all the more poignant. That makes it all the more emotional. So there are certain characters in here I didn't care too much about, but I still got teary-eyed when they died. I don't want to spoil anything for you. But going from that into the dread, this book drips dread. There are some scenes in here that not only build up the horror, but when the horror finally comes, you're completely unprepared for it. But you still have that preparation of the dread. It's like you know something terrible is going to happen. Here it comes, here it comes, and the payoff was always, always on point. And of course the last one is pacing. Something happened in every single chapter, something to move the story along. And so often, this is a chunk of a book, this is a 6x9, so it's the size of a hard cover, it's 400 pages. A paperback would probably be five to six hundred pages. Every single chapter had something going on. If it wasn't the character development, if it wasn't the dread, then there was just something there that kept me reading. I read this very slowly, I think about a chapter a day, sometimes two chapters because I just couldn't put it down. I need to harp on this. This book is something else. This book came out of nowhere for me. I knew Todd was a good writer. He's also a great guy. But this is also my first book that I've read from him. And I think that added a little bit to the fact that I was so damn shocked. The only criticism I have, and this isn't a criticism at all because I don't think he could have added more. I would have liked to see more from the Skippy character. But other than that, I don't have anything bad to say about this. I am hypercritical of horror, especially nowadays when you get so much buildup with so little payoff. I'm not going to mention any names. I don't want to spoil this review with other authors like I said at the beginning. I'm in awe of this man's talent. So much so that I went out and bought every single one of his books that he had available at his store. They should be on their way to me. The feeling that I came across maybe not a hidden gem because I've read reviews for his work, I shouldn't have been surprised because the people who were talking so well about him were people that I trusted. But it's still, even all that aside, it still blew me away. So the book is out today. I will leave links down there in the doobly-doo to the Amazon where you can buy the hard cover, the paperback, and the e-book, I think all at once, but I'm also going to link you to a place where you can get a signed copy of the book from Todd himself. All those links will be down there in the doobly-doo. I highly suggest getting the signed copy because I have a feeling that this book is going to just blow the fuck up. If you've read this, I'd love to talk to you about it. Please no spoilers down there in the doobly-doo. If you read it and you didn't like it, man, I would love to hear why you didn't like it. There's spoilers again. So if you do have spoilers you want to talk about spoilers, please let's talk elsewhere. Let's talk over on Twitter. You can DM me on Twitter, you know, that kind of thing. But yeah, go out and buy this. I can't harp on this enough. This is a fantastic novel. Unlike anything I've ever read, and yes it does have elements from all these other authors that people keep bringing up. There's even a blurb on the cover that dumps a whole bunch of different horror author names. It is truly Todd's own work and it is something to behold. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U, this has been another book review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye.