The Anomaly

“Nobody gets through life without being an asshole...Once in a while you're going to dig in over something and get it wrong and make a scratch on the world you'll never polish off. Those scratches will define you more than anything else.”

Wow. JUST BRILLIANT!
It took me a while to pick up the Anomaly after having it sit on my shelves for months, my god have I been missing out!
This book is fast paced, has great characters with complex fleshed out relationships, a unique story line... Most importantly it's genuinely creepy!

If your a horror fan READ THIS BOOK! Even if you're, not a horror fan read it anyway, it's just that good!

I didn't know what to expect when I started reading this book, I really didn't. I was hoping for a mystery and ended up getting a whole lot more. This book is so far out of anything I have ever read or usually ever read and yet I found out I really enjoyed it. I'm not one for horror or terror genre but in this case it was very thoroughly explained and shown, the need for said terror and horror. All in all, I was more then pleasantly surprised, I was elated.

To begin with, the story itself, it was one of those ‘I've never seen anything like it' plots and I loved it. I didn't have much to go off on, considering I don't usually read genres like this, but regardless it was a rollercoaster that I didn't want to get off of. I am definitely very grateful that I picked this book up off of the ‘Book of the Month Club'.

Next, the characters jumped up off the page and by the middle of the book, you felt like you'd really enjoy having a drink or two with them, that's how well we really got to know them. I appreciated that the characters were flawed in more ways then one, which made them so much more relatable, and therefore human. Sometimes characters get on my nerves a little when they try to be too much of a hero and spend too much time being perfect, well not this group of people. Raw and unfiltered, I really grew to like them a lot.

Further, the writing style was done really well and I didn't have many complaints about that either. It was precise and to the point without being too short and not giving us enough of a picture of what was going on. I was able to picture what was happening in the moment and the action was masterfully woven into the story, as were the slower parts. I could definitely see this being turned into a movie because it was playing in my head like a movie as I was reading it.

All in all, this story couldn't have been further from my usual cup of tea and yet I liked every single thing about it. I was afraid that it would be too gory for me (and it was gory), but the gore was done in a tasteful way and the mystery was explained, so the gore wasn't useless as in a lot of horror genre works. So it was definitely a mystery, mixed with a lot more action than I'm used to and adventure. I think anyone who likes any of those genres will really like this book and I definitely will be reading the second book in the series and more books by this author, after I recover from this book and the lasting impact it made on me. Sometimes it pays off to venture outside of your usual route and in this case, I hit the jackpot.