(I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review).
For a long time, I’ve enjoyed horror. Slasher movies, psychological horror…gore or not. So when I originally read the blurb of this book, I was immediately intrigued with the idea.
I felt this book came across more as a snippet into a world. It was good to be thrown into the action almost straight away with Jenkins and his job. However, because there was very little background or information about his past, I was completely thrown about what was going on. In the book, I only had the word of the characters that something was wrong with the jobs they’d gone on. As a reader, nothing seemed out of the ordinary with what I understood was going on.
I was intrigued by the different versions of the ghost/hologram that the four main villains/bad guys had apparently met and who had recruited them, but I did feel like I missed an awful lot of world building and character development. There were hints of a history in Castle and depth to his character, but I was left with one major question: Just how did these people get convinced to murder everyone?
I liked the whole idea of the multiverse and that it was a lot bigger than Jenkins initially realised. Martin and the presenter were intriguing characters, from what I saw of them, though I was a bit lost about exactly what the presenter’s role was.
The short story at the end of the book was another interesting glimpse into the world and it raised a really interesting question. However, I did feel that there were some contradictions during the course of the father’s interactions with his daughter. But I found it really thought-provoking to see how things might progress if a father took his child’s pain so she didn’t have to experience it.
This book could have been expanded and been a lot longer, with other missions and jobs shown. There was a lot of gore in the book, as promised, which provided for some good visuals. I just think that this was a very short book for a very wide universe, or multiverse.
Ink of Blood 