Fellside

I still love you, Mike Carey, but I just can't with this. I felt like I'd been reading forever, only to discover there were still 337 pages to go!

I kept waiting for the setup to end and the real plot to get going, only to realize that this was mostly going to be a drama about corruption and brutality in a prison, not a ghost story. The actual ghost story has an intriguing hook at the start, and then goes pretty much nowhere. Flipping to the end of the book shows me that the big reveal for that storyline is exactly what I figured out in the first two chapters.

If you're interested in a grim realistic story of prison life, layered with a kind of spiritual journey, this may delight you. I came for a ghost story, and I'm leaving early and unhappily.