Key takeaways
- The unreliable-document device is used well: you are reading the same pages the narrator is.
- The ending is deliberately unresolved, which is either the point or the cheat depending on your temperament.
- Commercial fiction is allowed to be this lurid; the craft question is whether it earns it.
A lot can happen in a second. Everything can change.
Colleen Hoover
What works
Compulsive. The manuscript chapters are genuinely unsettling and hard to put down.
What doesn’t
The romance and the horror pull in opposite directions, and the book never fully commits to either.
Who it’s for
Readers who want to be gripped and are not looking for a book to admire afterwards.
