Black Mouth

This book is like a mix between IT and Revival by Stephen King, and NOS4A2 by Joe Hill. The problem is, those books are great, and this book is just not as good at doing any of those things as well as the books it reminded me of.

Black Mouth follows a group of people who have to confront some evil they encountered previously when they were children. Sounds familiar, right? This part of the book was well done. The buildup between what happened in their childhood, when they encountered a magician in the forest, and what is happening when they are older was interesting. Malfi is particularly good at setting up a creepy atmosphere, and I think the dialogue in this book was better than average. Some of the horror imagery or the psychological issues the characters were dealing with was well done.

The problem here is that most of the characters are pretty bland. I just finished and I don't think I could tell you much about any of them besides the narrator, Jamie, and his brother, Dennis. I also thought the climax of the book just descended into silliness once we started getting “answers”, another similarity to IT.

Malfi tries to introduce a secondary antagonist that has ties to the same evil thing that the main group has, and I think this was the least effective part of the book. This character feels so lazy - we get access to his thoughts and he refers to the female lead as “the lesbian” every single time, okay we get it, he's homophobic. But let's hammer it in a bit more, he can start calling her a bitch every second sentence. Nuance! Also the perspective shifts of the book don't make sense. Most of it is told in first person perspective from Jamie, and then it switches to third person perspective for this character. But the book is later confirmed to be Jamie telling the story after the fact, so...what?

Overall, I think the book just suffered from constantly reminding me of better books.

I just finished reading Black Mouth by Ronald Malfi and here is what I thought about it.

2 decades was enough time for Jamie to forget the horrors of what happened when he was a child. Drinking and drugs didn't help him escape the darkness that unfolded that summer.

No longer able to outrun his past, Jamie has to return to Black mouth to collect his brother after their mother passed away. As fate would have it, he wasn't the only person to be returning to the place where it all happened, his 2 best friends from his teen years also have their own reasons for being drawn back to where it all started.

The 4 friends decide it is time to face the music of that summer and the deaths that happened because of their actions... The magician has reappeared and he hasn't been idle.... He has been leading other kids down a dangerous path and it's time for the friends to put an end to the monster once and for all......

Get ready to have the hairs on the back of your neck stay permanently erect. This book literally had me on the edge of my seat from start to finish. I was looking for the kind of horror read that built the kind of suspense that was almost too much to bear and this book nailed it.

The story centers around Jamie and his little brother Dennis and their friends Mia and Clay. One summer a man comes and teaches them magic tricks.... Something horrific happens and they don't see each other again until one day the man shows back up again and they all realize they need to face what happened. The book shifts in time to fill in the blanks of what happened that summer back to the present and you get a little of others points of view just for clarity.

The book was really well paced and I loved the dynamic between Jamie and his brother. I also really enjoyed that the book didn't give you an outright answer to the questions it asks.. I usually hate that but for this book, it worked so well.

I loved the eeriness of the town and the blanket of darkness that seemed to linger on every page. Really shock me out of my horror funk! This one was so brilliant and I cannot wait to see what else the author has to offer.

4.5 stars! You cannot go wrong with this book even if you tried.

Thank you to Netgalley and titan books for my ARC in exchange for my honest review.