I really tried hard to like or at least somewhat enjoy this book, but it was impossible. While Sarah Langan might be a talented author, for me she has clearly not found the right genre yet.
If you want to read about emotional problems of middle aged(ish) women - in very great detail - then yeah knock yourself out, this is the book for you. Otherwise you might want to look somewhere else.
The biggest issue is that one character is introduced after another and their completely irrelevant problems are filling page after page. I have read over 1/3 of the book, was desperately waiting for something interesting to happen, when yet another character was thrown at me. At this point I wanted all of them to die already just so they shut up.
Another issue is that it tries really hard to be a "horror book", so much that you can not help but notice. One example is the arousal of the protagonists while they eat dirt or other nasty stuff. I do not mind sexual references at all, but this is so completely irrelevant and only exists because the author wanted this to be as gross as possible. Cut it out and you lose nothing of the feel or the message, it would just be less silly.
Well, to keep it short, it is not my cup of tea. In my eyes this "style" is better suited for other genres.
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