I was stuck waiting for the next book in the series I am reading to be delivered so I decided to give this one a go. I had heard that it was a nice short spooky horror read and I was excited to jump in.

It was nice and short, but I think that really worked against it. So much of the book consisted of the characters and their backgrounds being described in detail. This helps in the area of getting to the know the characters and their relationships to each other, but in a book that is only a little over 100 pages I feel like it was not the best use of that space. I picked up this book because it was advertised as a spooky read perfect for Halloween season and in the end, it was pretty disappointing. During all of the character explanations I found myself waiting for the spooky stuff to come and when it finally did it was a little underwhelming. There was only minimal build up or tension surrounding the main creature and when it finally showed up it didn’t even seem like that big of a deal. The fact that the characters had time to have a full conversation when the main creature showed up for the first time pulled me out of it a little bit. The main creature is basically bearing down on one of the characters and two other characters find the time to just talk about the situation.

This coupled with the frequent interludes to give overly detailed descriptions of things made the book have a very start stop feeling for me. Just like the character information, the extra detail felt like it was taking up time that could have been spent in furthering the spooky feel of the book. Now don’t get me wrong the character relationship are well described, if a little cliche, and the interludes of detailed descriptions are very well written and executed, I just think they filled up the short book very quickly and didn’t leave space for much else. 

One of the final things that bothered me is that the characters are described as having interest in hauntings and ghost related things, but the cavalier way they responded to the horror elements in the book was a little odd. I originally looked at this fact in a negative light and while I still think it takes away from the horror element a bit, someone made a comment that made me look at it differently. They said that they found that it read like a bad horror movie, and I completely agree. So, if you go into reading it looking through that particular lens it does make the book feel a lot more reasonable. The characters decisions and how they act have a lot more “logic” to them when seen from the perspective of a bad horror movie. 

While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this book if someone asked for a horror recommendation, I think it does have its own niche category that some people would love. Overall, I enjoyed the premise of the book and I think Japanese folklore is an awesome medium for horror stories, but this one just didn’t really hit the mark for me.