I enjoyed the setting of The Black Farm being some kind of purgatory domain (though if this is purgatory, I’d hate to see what hell would look like in this world). The island in a black ocean guarded by ancient titans and glowing hieroglyphics was a very cool idea. It’s a shame we didn’t get to learn more about them.
I feel like that last sentence sums up my thoughts about this in. Everything went by so quickly that we barely had time to learn about the island and it’s inhabitants.
The majority of the characters felt 1 dimensional. Almost all can be reduced to being friendly to the protagonist only to be shortly killed off. It’s hard to really feel much of anything after this happens the 3rd time.
I also found the violence to be flatly written as well. It can be reduced to the character is stabbed, it hurts, and then never brought up again. The pain and injury doesn’t seem to affect the characters at all.
Let not even get started on how many times the word “hysteria” is repeated.
I’ll admit I am not typically a fan of extreme horror or splatter punk because this seems go be a trend. I’d love to see the level of world building with more fleshed out side characters from this author as they had some solid ideas.