Return to the Black Farm

Return to the Black Farm wallows in the same fetid muck as its predecessor, The Black Farm.

And it makes exactly the same mistakes! Pretty decent for about 50% before forgetting the rules of storytelling and throwing caution to the wind.

There's a little stroke of genius via the introduction of a new child character called Emily. She needs to be protected and cared for at all costs, giving the narrative a new sense of validity and impending danger, and there's a survival horror section en route to meet the Mud Man that's pretty gripping, squeezing through tiny tunnels and fighting off giant bugs on the edge of annihilation.

And then Elias Witherow digs his own lack-of-credibility grave once again.

No character development when it comes to the mud men except that they're squishy and rather sad - a whole chapter or backstory should have been penned! Instead, we get on with the bombastic action because that's the way the author writes. Maybe running out of ideas, getting desperate to please, or perhaps simply getting bored?

And then we go full on SMH Godzilla! Really.

And don't get me started about punching the living daylights out of angels and even God himself because you're SO ANGRY!

I'm giving this book 3 stars because there's a lot of good in it, but this is why Splatterpunk literature has a bad reputation - not necessarily because of the gore, it isn't even scary most of the time - except for the fantastical underground abyss section - but because of the cheap, half-arsed writing to ramp things up for spectacularly horrific literature, which often works the other way round.

And I also found the first-person-perspective really jarring at times.

I don't get it.

Starts off well and then becomes absurd (part 2).