Amy's Reviews > King Nyx

** spoiler alert ** I received this book as an ARC from NetGalley and WW Norton for my free and unbiased review.

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Boy, what a disjointed, bizarre mess. It’s as though Bakis mashed up Shutter Island, The Woman in Black, Rebecca, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The Most Dangerous Game, and I do mean mashed up. I had high expectations. Gothic narrative in which a woman with prior mental health issues is exposed to a mystery? Sure. Count me in. But none of what happens in this novel held my attention, enabled a suspension of disbelief, or aroused a sense of suspense in general. Honesty, had I not received this as an ARC I would have dnf’d it at about 50 pages, by which point I had physically rolled my eyes at least four times. I cannot recall another book that had me doing so.

CW: domestic violence, gaslighting, institutionalization, child sex crimes. fetish sex, gun violence, all of which are mentioned or gestured to, none of which accomplish the shock value I suspect the author was aiming for.

The more this author and her narrator revealed the less I cared, the less I believed the narrator, and the more bored I became. There was no sense of connection between so many parts of the narrative, each more bizarre than the last. A reclusive billionaire on an island? OK, but one who quarantines guests for an undisclosed reason and period of time in creepy cabins, has the, guarded by armed guards, and feeds them from daily trunks of gourmet cuisine that somehow magically stays hot,or cold forever? No. Runaway girls from a reform school,on the same island run by the same billionaire? Weirder still. And now they are living in the woods, in a graveyard, nursing infants in the moonlight. And don’t even get me started on the co-dependent narrator, her wastrel husband and their mutually obsessive research subject on bizarre rain (frogs, blood, etc.), and her damned birds.

Just nope. I clearly did not read the same book as the others who have reviewed it so far. This was not a well-wrought “psychological thriller” anymore than Annie’s husband Charles is a “crypto scientist.” Yeesh. Don’t drink the kool-aid on this one.