invein

Had to push myself to finish it. Started out pretty good, then turned very bland and annoying after 200 pages. So much dull moments, pages of characters speculating who might be involved, what would happen if they did this or that and a lot of boring backtracking into the past – especially in high tension moments that should've/could've been thrilling. All the dark violence and bleakness which would have made a compelling thriller plot got buried under mediocre writing and kinda stupid characters. Meh.

The best work of Brubaker and Phillips I've read so far. While the whole Criminal series is quite fantastic, vol 5 and 6 are really outstanding, and the defining noir-comics of this generation.
Very dark, gritty and depressing, there is no room for good in the world of Criminal, and this story is the very heart of darkness. A brutal but beautiful look at greed, love and nostalgia and a must read for crime- and Brubaker-fans. Amazing.

A bit too infantile to really scare or shock me. All of the 16 serial killers are kinda ridiculous (a luchador? seriously?). I don't know...I love serial killer stories but this felt really dumb and like a parody. If it wasn't so explicit and brutal at times, it would be a perfect story for kids and teens, because it's kinda immature. Well I enjoyed it just so that I want to read on. Let's see where this is going, but I'm very underwhelmed after all the praise it got.

Very lame ending to a kinda boring series. I love Brubaker/Phillips, Noir and Horror so this seemed like the perfect series for me...what a letdown. I bought all volumes at once and read them over the course of 4 weeks. Still, I always ended up forgetting what happened in the previous volumes and confused arcs because they are always kinda the same Story but in different time periods. Disappointing, but still ok.

At first this was a solid 4-5 star extreme-horror-book, intriguing, nice setup, weird idea. But at around 50% I noticed that the narrator was just telling the same few lines over and over and over and over again. About how he felt the last time he delivered vengeance, how he is going to deliver vengeance now, how he's gonna rain vengeance down on those guys, like the other guys before, that vengeance is the sweetest thing, that he has to deliver vengeance in a really brutal way, so when he's going to deliver that vengeance, they will know he had delivered vengeance, and he will feel like the other time he delivered vengeance and it's the best feeling. It's just so repetitive, I started to skip almost entire pages because he just went on and on without actually saying or doing anything that moves the story forward. The book could have been 30 pages shorter, easily.

I don't know if it's on purpose, to really “get into the mind” of this guy, get a glimpse of his addiction and what it does to him, but it just felt too much for me, like the author really tried to stretch a novella into a novel.

Despite that gripe, I still had a good time reading this. I ‘enjoyed' most of the story and I can recommend it to any fan of extreme horror and splatterpunk.