I picked up Erebus shortly after reading a true story about adventures in the Antarctic. As I started reading I was immediately impressed by the author’s background knowledge of the setting. There were mentions of several real people and places. It was a good way to kick off the story.
However, the intrigue stopped there. As the plot progressed, the good setup quickly crumbled and all that was left was a pretty narrow and shallow storyline with characters that I didn’t even get a chance to know before they got killed off. More often than not I found myself getting confused as to what had just happened, who had died, who was still alive, and where all the characters were at, because it all happened too quickly with too little descriptive wording to help my brain keep up.
The major hinge of the story itself, the monster, was somewhat of a disappointment as well. It was plagued with tropes common to the creature feature subgenre that resulted in a monster I feel like I’ve seen before in plenty of movies, and although a pretty good attempt was made at grounding the monster in scientific plausibility–which admittedly was pretty interesting–it wasn’t enough to salvage what was simply just a boring monster.
My favorite part of the story was one character I actually got to know well enough to like. For some reason his development was more rounded than anyone else’s in the story, and overall he was just a far more interesting character.
Finally, aside from the writing style simply being too quick-paced for my taste, I also feel the audiobook narrator’s narration style did not compliment the writing style well either.