Worthe's Village

What happens when you get dumped into a village full of the dead? Marcus is about to find out. Mr. Worthe has created a village of the dead, moving homes into a secured area, and then dropping test subjects to see how they manage. Marcus has, so far, lasted far longer than anyone expected, and now has additional people to care for.

He also has the help of one of the ghosts, that he has released from her torment, and he is determined to alleviate at least one of the stronger ghosts.

I truly enjoyed this book! It was amazing! Shorter chapters allow for a better stopping point as needed, and just the right amount of creep factor. Ron Ripley is one of my favorite authors.

I won a copy of this in a giveaway, so I really wanted to read through it and leave an honest review! If you know me at all, you know that I love a good horror story. When haunted houses are involved? Well now, you have me rapt. There's something chilling about thinking about a place that is so rife with evil that it radiates out into the world. Now imagine a whole city of that same house, and you have the setup for Worthe's Village.

To put it simply, this book was a fence sitter for me. On the one hand, I absolutely adored Marcus and was cheering for him the whole time. It's nice to have a character to truly rally behind in a story like this, that is so bloody and violent. On the other hand, the story felt a little slow to me most of the way through and (I never thought I'd say this) too needlessly violent. Don't get wrong, you can't help but assume some that people are going to die in a village comprised entirely of viciously haunted homes. Still, I'm the kind of reader who really needs more time with the set up, and with my characters. I felt like this story somehow moved too quickly, in terms of character development, and too slowly, in terms of actual plot movement. There were some wonderfully dark scenes though, so it kept me reading on.

At the end I was a little frustrated by the lack of closure, but I also knew going in that this is the first book in a series. Since I had a pretty enjoyable experience with Worthe and his violent little village, I've decided I'll be moving on to the next book. Hopefully now they'll be more time to really hang with Marcus, because that man is one bad mother trucker. I'd hang with him in a zombie apocalypse any day.