The Ritual

I have serious mixed feelings about this book because, just like a lot of the other reviews are mentioning, it feels like two completely different stories in one.

The first half of the book was incredible. It had me completely hooked and managed to constantly make me feel like I was in the intense, dire and downright terrifying situations that the characters were going through every time I'd read it. It had great character development, so many clever twists and takes on classic horror tropes, and actually may just be some of the best horror fiction I've ever read.

Then in the second half, all of that went away. The whole story lost momentum, almost felt like it even changed genres and just went off the rails into pure fantastical nonsense. That was really disappointing.

All things considered, I'm still going to give it 3 stars simply because of how great the first half was, and the very end was actually decent. It's very disappointing how things ended up panning out though, and I really wish that the feel of the first half of the story had continued throughout the whole book. It's actually quite baffling to me as to why the author chose to go with what he ended up going with when he was onto something so unique and captivating initially.