Review: Goblin by Josh Malerman

 

Goblin by Josh Malerman

Publication Date: May 18, 2021

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I hated this book and I hate that I hated this book. Bird Box was one of the more frightening books I've ever read, and The House at the Bottom of the Lake was a genuinely intriguing, original novella. I was excited to pick up this new offering from their author, and it sounded so good--six (well, seven or eight, depending on how you categorize the Prologue and Epilogue) interconnected novellas set in the town of Goblin, where it never stops raining, unspeakable things dwell in the woods, and there's something very, very wrong with the local police officers.

The problem was, the plots were so predictable that I kept guessing the endings only a few pages in. And the writing . . . plodded. There was no sense of creeping terror, no sense of mounting dread. I didn't care about the characters' fates, and I thought the author did a strangely poor job on Goblin itself; a town that should have been a character in its own right just fell flat to me. The stories are interconnected, in the sense that they're all set in Goblin and every once in a while a character shows up or is mentioned in multiple stories, but I thought they'd be a bit more interconnected. By which I mean: each of these basically stands alone, Prologue/Epilogue aside, and I thought that kind of defeated the point of the whole 'interconnected novellas' thing. Part of the fun in reading interconnected stories is spotting bits and pieces carrying over from one story to the next, and while there was a bit of that, I thought it was a far, far too small bit.

Of all the stories here, "A Mix-Up At the Zoo" was the only one that even moderately held my attention, and even that only came in flickers. These stories were, in a word, bland. And I doubt the author intended that, but . . . I think it boils down to this: these stories spent way too much time dwelling on things that didn't scare me, and far too little time on things that did. That's death to a horror novel.

The scariest thing about this book was seeing how much of it I still had to read. It's rare for me to give a book 1 star, but reading this was a chore and I know for a fact the author can do better.

Not recommended.