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The Ruin Season
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
136 of 235
Kindle
The Ruin Season
By Kristopher Triana
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Jake Leonard has more than his share of troubles. He’s close to 40 now and suffers from bipolar disorder and the painful memories of the psychotic episodes that derailed his life.
Living in the rural south, Jake spends his days breaking horses and his nights training dogs in solitude. His 19-year-old girlfriend, Nikki, is the daughter of the local sheriff, and she’s just getting worse with drugs and alcohol. Jake does his best to persuade her to ease up on them, but things go from bad to worse when Nikki has a breakdown and gets involved in heroin and low-budget porn.
After a friend’s funeral, Jake reconnects with his ex-wife Michelle. He’s never stopped loving her, but she’s remarried with a young daughter.
Soon, chaos unfolds like a pocketknife, and as Jake’s dark history is revealed, he finds himself spinning toward the inner demons he’s worked so hard to escape.

This was one of those that you have to keep reading a lot of it got home bipolar is such a horrible illness. It was a whole rollercoaster of how life can change so quickly and our decisions have a dramatic effect, especially those made when not of a clear mind.
  
The Dark Net
The Dark Net
Benjamin Percy | 2017 | Fiction & Poetry, Horror, Thriller
8
8.3 (4 Ratings)
Book Rating
I really think that the synopsis for this book is not up to scratch! Although, yes, the synopsis is what initially drew me to this book, after reading it I can say that the book is <i><b>WAY</b></i> better than the synopsis would make you believe!

This book tackles the subject of good and evil, with references to demons and black magic… which I didn’t get at all from the synopsis! I was expecting this to have a much deeper involvement with the dark net, what’s on it and how it’s used. While yes, there is that to the book, it’s not necessarily it’s main focus.

To begin with, this lack of talk about the dark net actually made me hesitant about the book. I was expecting something so much different to what I was reading, I felt really disappointed. But, that feeling didn’t last for long. This is so unlike anything I’ve ever read before and that made everything about this book really exciting. Not to mention, this is a super clever book! It uses real life scenarios that we can all relate to, or at least know about, and explains it with a black magic twist.

For example, when talking about demon possession, it explains how small demons can take over and that causes a man to plow a lorry through a busy crowd, or a school shooting – a one off awful occasion in history. But when a big, strong demon comes along, it can posses not only a person, but a nation. It uses examples of the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide, which I thought was really smart!

Characters in this book were excellent, but there were quite a lot of them that we needed to get to know. Juniper was by far my favourite of the bunch, Sarin coming in at a close second. I loved that there was a strong, bad-ass female character who wasn’t irritating (Lela, I’m looking at you!).

As for the story, I will say that it feels a bit all over the place at times. It’s not difficult to wrap your head around but there are a lot of things pulled in to the story at different times and this sometimes got a bit manic. This is classed as a horror novel, and for me, there definitely were some creepy bits. The hounds especially made my skin crawl.

Overall, I ended up really loving this novel. It was short and sweet (although it almost took me a whole 7 days to read), and it was exciting, creepy and fast-paced! A great novel for anyone who likes a darker thriller. Lots of gruesome deaths and bad-ass characters.

<i>Thanks to BookBridgr and Hodder & Stoughton for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.</i>