Sordid, Not Supernatural: The Reaping

I've been really excited by the covers for Valancourt's paperbacks from hell series, inspired by Grady Hendrix's book of the same name, but after picking up another one of those titles, this time, The Reaping, I have to say the text doesn't live up to the gorgeous outside.

The back cover promised a strange house with a strange request- a commission of a portrait from a little-known author being paid lots more than he should be. The letdown for me, though, was that the painting had nothing to do with the plot at all. It was just a way to get Tom through the door. Tom is struggling with his love interest, and becomes entangled with the subject he's meant to paint (obviously), but the whole structure of the plot as genuinely weird (not scary) things happen to him read more like an episode script for Law and Order: SVU than a classic horror story. The things that happen are weird, yes, but not in the creepy sort of way that keeps you up at night. There's some supernatural/occultish stuff literally thrown in at the very end, but when that happens after hundreds of pages of Tom shrugging off strange and unsettling behaviors, the elements that help categorize this book as horror feel forced, rushed, and out of place. I sped-read the mundane bits that felt like melodrama to see what the ending held, and it just made no sense. No sense.

I was hoping for something a little bit more like A Cure for Wellness blended with "Pickman's Model," and maybe even "The Dreams in the Witch House," but what happened was very very far from that. I mean, c'mon. How do you have nuns on the cover and not utilize them to all their creepy gothic potential?

K Rating: 1/5