I wouldn't call Darkbound a great horror novel, but I don't know when I last enjoyed one as much. At 280-some pages, the plot clips along at a nice pace, and while I figured out some of the twists I still couldn't put it down until the very end.

The gore is very gory, but as detailed as it is, the author doesn't spend pages and pages spelling it out complete with the victim's every feeling of fear and pain. It doesn't have the richly endless bloodbaths of Clive Barker or the luxurious suffering-every-paper-cut detail of Stephen King, which is a plus for me. Normally I try to skim over those bits, and while you totally can here (it's easy to do--any important story bits you might miss will be explained later), I didn't find it necessary. YMMV.

It might've been a mistake to pick it up as bedtime reading, but it's great quick, light, delicious horror that's easy to digest in one sitting, and not so easy to forget.

The Fault in Our Stars is an improbable story, but it doesn't feel like one when you're reading it. It feels exactly right.

Maybe it resonates so strongly because of my life as a sick child and then a sick adult who lost most of her sick friends in childhood. Our lives were more predictable because we didn't have cancer, which is unpredictable pretty much all the time, but we were still surprised sometimes. We loved each other and sometimes we fell in love and once in a while the person who died was the one who wasn't supposed to.

What I'm getting at is that it's really weird being a kid and having a mental list of which friends are supposed to die first. Green captures that feeling, all of those feelings, better than anyone I've read who wasn't somehow one of us. I was sure that he had lost a child or a sibling to cancer, right up the point in the acknowledgements where he says he didn't. It's that good.

So it's also that bad. I felt Hazel's pain and joy and fear so completely it was frightening, even as I was jealous of her strength. Hazel is a beautiful creature, as is Augustus, and their love is a privilege to witness. 

Bonus points to Green for making up a book for them to bond over rather than using an existing one and turning it into a half-assed lit class. That was a real stroke of genius and made their world all the more real for being wholly fictional.

I'm just going to start off by saying that this book is terrible. In pretty much every way. But it's the kind of terrible where, after a hard week of challenging reading (and, you know, actual work), you can just sort of shut down your brain and skim through it.

Like everyone else, I was sucked in by the premise of spoiled rich girl turned good after losing her memory. But it was all so trite and pat and perfectly pointless. The characters where one dimensional, and though they changed, they never gained depth. They just went from one dimensionally awful to one dimensionally good. Except for the requisite Magical Negroes, Carol the homeless guru, and Beatriz, the technically Mexican housekeeper. Between the two of them it takes about 2 weeks to transform Sia from queen of the bitches to queen of the fundraisers, but not one word of it was believable.

I got it on special from Amazon for less than a dollar, but I still returned it. My day, however, I will never get back.