Black Mouth

This book is like a mix between IT and Revival by Stephen King, and NOS4A2 by Joe Hill. The problem is, those books are great, and this book is just not as good at doing any of those things as well as the books it reminded me of.

Black Mouth follows a group of people who have to confront some evil they encountered previously when they were children. Sounds familiar, right? This part of the book was well done. The buildup between what happened in their childhood, when they encountered a magician in the forest, and what is happening when they are older was interesting. Malfi is particularly good at setting up a creepy atmosphere, and I think the dialogue in this book was better than average. Some of the horror imagery or the psychological issues the characters were dealing with was well done.

The problem here is that most of the characters are pretty bland. I just finished and I don't think I could tell you much about any of them besides the narrator, Jamie, and his brother, Dennis. I also thought the climax of the book just descended into silliness once we started getting “answers”, another similarity to IT.

Malfi tries to introduce a secondary antagonist that has ties to the same evil thing that the main group has, and I think this was the least effective part of the book. This character feels so lazy - we get access to his thoughts and he refers to the female lead as “the lesbian” every single time, okay we get it, he's homophobic. But let's hammer it in a bit more, he can start calling her a bitch every second sentence. Nuance! Also the perspective shifts of the book don't make sense. Most of it is told in first person perspective from Jamie, and then it switches to third person perspective for this character. But the book is later confirmed to be Jamie telling the story after the fact, so...what?

Overall, I think the book just suffered from constantly reminding me of better books.