Graveyard Shift
Ratings48
Average rating3.2
A brief dive into mycology and the questionable ethics scientific experimentation invites. It was all right, but too short to get attached to anyone, and too high level to satisfy my itch for creepy sci-fi.
I liked the setting. There was a pointless amount of characters for how short the book was. It could have been three people and wrapped up in fifty pages. Might read more by the author but this one wasn't worth it.
Can't wait to read this novella when it's finished!
Oh wait, it... IS... finished?
I don't normally rate books so low or review things harshly but come on lol this is first draft The Secret History fanfic type writing with 5 pages of M. L. Rio's better book in the back to pad it. There were a handful of disjointed and incomplete characters not doing anything significant for 108 pages. I wanted something to happen so bad. I could SENSE that there were ideas here SOMEWHERE. I KNOW M. L. Rio can write! I read IWWV and really liked it! Not sure what happened here lol
Graveyard Shift starts as a creepy atmospheric mystery, but it quickly devolves into a Scooby-Doo episode, except in this gang everyone is sleep deprived and a chain smoker.
This novella explores the dark side of academia through the lives of five insomniacs living in a college town. A short and easy to read story that starts strong but, by the end, seems rushed and incomplete.
i really wanted to love this book because the concept is so interesting and i love the exploration of sleep disorders, specifically insomnia in this book. but on the other hand this kinda fell flat. reading this was enjoyable but it has no real depth to the plot line or characters. its similar to like scooby doo episode for adults, which i still love even now as an adult myself but it had way less action and suspense than the children's show. overall it was okay and i would recommend checking it out if you're interested but it wasn't anything to write home about for me personally.
I really wanted to love this book - after all If We Were Villains is very dear to me - but it just felt off.
It read like it was meant for a much younger audience, despite (some of) the characters being in their 30s and the abrupt ending really threw me off- but not in a good way. I thought maybe I had a faulty copy because surly this cannot be the ending?
Overall, sadly, do not recommend.
Literally nothing happened and whoever categorized this as “horror” needs to think again. At least the writing was nice.
The premise and the investigation part of this novella were interesting but I couldn't care less for any of the protagonists.
I felt that having so many povs and jumping between them didn't really work for a book this size. At least for me.
The ending was cool, though.
Thanks to NetGalley and Flatiron Books/Macmillan Audio for this one. I received the audio, of which there were multiple narrators, each doing a different POV that kind of felt like Scooby Doo to me (for adults, and in a good way). This is a first for me from the author.
This is a novella that features a ragtag group of late night smokers that meet every night in the local cemetery. At the beginning of the story, which atmospherically takes place in October, they stumble upon a hole in the ground that was definitely not there before! They think that this digger may be linked to other strangenesses around town.
Unfortunately for me, while I did enjoy each of the characters and their differences, the paraphrase of the blurb above is just about as deep and descriptive as the novella as a whole. While I’m still kind of in the middle on this one, as there were several things I did enjoy, this just read like an introduction, not a story. There’s more development of the characters as they are introduced in the switching POV than there is in the development of the story itself.
They chase a suspect of the digging, which you’d think would be this giant reveal, but it just kind of happened before petering out. Then they were onto the next thing. Which is what left me hanging, because the atmosphere is palpable during the scene. And the scene that involves a certain rat was a highlight for me, creepy, dark, eerily toothy, but even though it does tie into the overall arc, it just needed more for me to sink my teeth into.
I really like the cover, and as both rats and fungus are kind of topical for the FanFiAddict crew, I wanted to feel like this was a hit. I don’t want to bring in any spoilers here, but the ending felt rushed, underdeveloped in the sense that it’s just handed to you and it’s over.