Frankenstein: The Dead Town

"{4.75/5}<br/><br/>CW: violence, gore, some others<br/><br/>Ah, the end of a series. What a bittersweet time for a reader.<br/><br/>In a small town in Montana, Victor Frankenstein’s latest monsters are taking over. Small pockets of humans have formed, but can they hold out against an evil no one understands?<br/><br/>Writing reviews for any series longer than a duology is particularly difficult for me, because after the first 2-3 books, there’s only so much that can be discussed without spoilers. Presumably, if you’re reading a review for a book further into the series, you know (or expect) that you like the author’s writing based on the first books. Or maybe you like their other work and want to see what this particular storyline is like. Either way, you’ve probably already got a feel for their style, their characters, and their overall content quality. And since I don’t do spoilers in my reviews, there isn’t much left for me to talk about. But I’m going to try, because this whole series was so much fun that I feel like it deserves the extra effort.<br/><br/>This book, like book 4, felt a little different than the first 3 in the series. It’s definitely still got that body horror, gross feel to it, but there’s less emphasis on those parts. It feels somehow more sterile, more weird than vomit-inducing. It’s still pretty nasty, but it’s prioritized the ‘something’s lurking in the dark’ vibes you’d expect to see in a thriller. Or maybe the first three were just so nasty that I’ve become desensitized to it; who knows? But boy howdy does that thriller categorization really hit home. There are just so many bits that are individually *wrong* in an unnamable, tension-building, edge-of-a-cliff way. It’s glorious. <br/><br/>Unlike books 1-3, and like book 4, this one also focuses more on the characters we want to root for and less on the evil monster army that Frankenstein’s built. It’s still multi-focused, we still jump back and forth between those focuses, but significantly fewer of them in this installment are based on the bad guys. <br/><br/>All in all, this was a great end to a series that will live on in my memory forever. The whole thing was the perfect blend of creepy, psychotic, and monstrous with just the right amount of humor, snark, and absurdity to make it enjoyable. While the pacing did feel a little slower in this last one, I would 100% re-read the entire series and will definitely be recommending it to anybody who enjoys this genre."