Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason are described as "The Sisters of Slaughter" and Mayan Blue is their debut. And a confused debut it is.

Four students and their assistant professor head for the mountains of Georgia where they are to meet up with their professor who feels he's made a great discovery that will change the way history books are written. Once near the rendezvous point, all hell breaks loose. In what they think is the professor crying out for help, Wes and Alissa go off to find him. What they discover an open doorway to a Mayan underworld located deep within a cave inside the mountain. Mayans in Georgia? I like the idea. Unfortunately, that's about as good as it gets.

Mayan Blue had some promise. The premise of a Mayan underworld in Georgia had lots of possibilities. Instead, it ended up being one long chase scene where way too little happens. The beginning of the story starts out as a B-horror movie style story. Annoying cannon fodder characters that scream I'm going to be killed before the story even gets going. Then it opens up into the Mayan underworld with good shapeshifting characters. Then the last 1/2 to 1/3 ends up being a murky chase scene where characters are introduced for no apparent reason adding nothing to the story. Our heroes get injured so many times that you start wondering why they haven't dropped long ago from blood loss. Too little character and plot development dampens what could've been a great story.
You can see the talent is there. They simply need to focus on tightening up the story, spending more time on plot.

2 1/2 Sacrifices out of 5

This ARC was provided in exchange for an honest review.

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The debut novel of horror from the shared pen of Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason, known collectively as "The Sisters of Slaughter", is an exuberantly over the top gorefest that captures the no holds barred spirit of the early days of the horror boom.

An archeology professor, seeking the truth behind the end of the Mayan civilization, unleashes that truth when he unwittingly breaks open the seal on the doorway to Xibalba....the realm of the Mayan Lord of Death, hidden deep in the mountains of Georgia.

A fast paced read that captures the feel of a 70s horror movie, while offering up a myth system that is so colorfully different and complex, it grabs your attention.....and yanks it out your nose. The Sisters' shared imagination is a thing of wonder, and they let it run wild in these pages, creating imagery that will splatter blood across your nightmares for a long time to come. Yeah, this one gets nasty......but ain't that what we're here for?

While there are points where this novel is obviously a first effort, the Sisters' writing is near perfect, seamless as they work in concert, raising Mayan Blue above the pack of debut authors.

The Sisters of Slaughter are authors to watch.....and I know I will be. Grab a copy of Mayan Blue and tell me I'm wrong.

Highly recommended.

Dubbed The Sisters of Slaughter by the editor of Fireside Press, Michelle Garza and Melissa Larson make their novel-length debut with Mayan Blue. I think the Fireside folks were on to something with their proclamation, and the sisters earn their bloody stripes well here.

First off, let me just say how glad I am to read a horror book that is influenced by ancient continental American lore, rather then the johnny come lately Christian influences that predominate most modern works. Granted, those influences have produced some great stories, particularly in terms of my recent reads like Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts and Hunter Shea's I Kill In Peace. But it's fun to spice things up a bit by reaching into a deeper, richer history of the Americas.

Mayan Blue, as the title indicates, reaches back to the peak of the Mayan heyday, drawing on the occult beliefs of Mesoamerican and Central American people to craft a present-day horror story. Building off the debunked speculations of Mayan civilization reaching as far north as Georgia, the sisters craft a novel in which such speculations are on the verge of being validated. Unfortunately, the professor in possession of the evidence has gone missing, and his small team of university researchers are en route to recover him.

From the outset, Garza and Lason let the blood spill, plunging their small cast of characters into the depths of Mayan hell. There's plenty of action to go around as the group is confronted with a number of horrors, from the labyrinthine and booby-trapped maze of the newly discovered Mayan temple to the angry gods and their owl-headed, sharp-clawed servants.

This is a fun and quick bit of adventure horror, with a number of well-drawn splatter scenes. Bodies are flayed and entrails spilled all over the place. My only real complaint about the book is that the characters are paper thin, with several of them never rising above a quickly drawn stereotype before being dispatched in some nicely grisly scenes. While their deaths are certainly interesting, it's a shame that their demise is the most interesting thing to happen to them in the brief moments we spend with them. In order for horror to be truly effective, there needs to be characters to root for and against, people you can become attached to and sympathize for and with. I didn't feel particularly attached to anybody in this book. While the gore and setting may be memorable, the characters, unfortunately, are not.

Aside from that, I had a fun time with Mayan Blue. I greatly appreciated the change of scenery it provided, and the way its influences in both the creature-feature and slasher genres merged to form a truly appropriate temple of doom.

[Note: this review is based an advanced, uncorrected proof copy supplied by the authors in exchange for an honest review.]