Title: Burn the Dark
Author: S.A. Hunt
Publication Date: January 14, 2020
Publisher: Tor
Format: Edelweiss eARC

They got me with the Supernatural and Buffy comps, like the predictable bookwyvern I am.

I mean, who can even resist that? I’m only human … ish. The addition of a YouTube star seemed like a new twist, and I was interested to see what direction that ultimately took the story.

Burn the Dark is a dark, grim book about a woman seeking revenge against the witches who killed her mother. It’s full of humor, horror, and plenty of delightful, skin-crawling moments.

Now, I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t love this book, and I struggled to get through parts of it, but all in all, it was an interesting read. There was a lot of tension, and definitely moments that really creeped me out and kept me wanting more.

❧ Robin makes for a fun lead character.

She’s tough and kicks ass and has goals. I mean, sure, those goals include homicide, but we all have our faults. She isn’t completely one dimensional, though, because behind that bravado, she has quite a few really vulnerable, honest moments, and I enjoyed that side of her, too.

This story isn’t just about Robin hunting witches for the heck of it. It’s a story about revenge and betrayal, and Robin’s story unfolds a little at a time.

Going in, I thought yeah, okay, she’s just hunting witches, but there’s so much more to her story than that. There are things in her past that sort of surprised me, and there are things that even she doesn’t know that the reader gets to discover with her.

❧ When this book gets creepy, it gets freaking creepy.

There’s a pervasive atmosphere in this book of something lingering in the darkness, just outside of sight. Or something dark and dreadful on the horizon that you can’t quite see yet, but you know it’s coming. I really enjoyed this, and all the little creepy things that happen along the way.

If you have arachnophobia, like I do, fair warning that there will be a scene that will make you want to burn the book and maybe your house and oh god your brain too because now that image is planted there. *FLAILS* Resist the urge. Be strong. Remember that you want to know how this ends.

❧ This book is dark (in all the good ways), but it has just enough humor to keep it from being depressing or overwhelming.

Now, I’m going to admit that humor is subjective, and some of the things were misses for me. Sometimes, the humor passed just normal joking or sarcasm and became something sort of absurd, where I was rolling my eyes rather than laughing. But for the most part? I really appreciated the humor, and there were quite a few times I was laughing out loud.

This wasn’t just a Robin thing, either, which I liked. Every character had their own brand of humor, so there’s a little bit of something for everyone, depending what your tastes are.

❧ This cast of characters is eclectic and fun and touches on all sorts of diverse walks of life.

You’ve got the wounded veteran who’s trying to find a way to fill the void in his life since he was essentially forced to retire. The openly gay (and proud) black guy who’s doing his best to take care of his mama. The computer whiz and nerd. The kid who lost his mother from cancer. The kid who never has enough to eat. The father who is struggling with grief and alcoholism.

At times, the characters felt like caricatures, and I can’t say I particularly connected with any of them other than Robin, but they did certainly liven the book up.

Even though I, personally, didn’t connect with the characters, I can see them being relatable to others. They’re just different enough that when they team up, it creates an interesting dynamic.

❧ This book felt a lot like Supernatural, and that can be both good and bad.

On the one hand, I picked it up partly because of that comp. It has the same dark feeling, the paranormal layered on top of the real world, the whole vibe of “the monsters you thought were fake actually exist.” I enjoyed all of that. Plus, Robin’s personality reminds me a lot of Dean, and I’m all for that. It also had the big cast of characters that our heroine meets along the way, although they didn’t have the same depth and appeal, I thought, of the Supernatural characters.

Where this really fell down for me was that it was so similar that I kept comparing the two, and this came up short every time. To the point where I could guess major plot twists solely because I imagined the major plot twists in Supernatural, and sure enough, they fit that overall theme.

If you’ve never watched Supernatural, this probably isn’t a problem for you. It was just a little too similar for me, personally.

❧ Heinrich is a treasure (I can tell from the brief glimpses of him we get), and I cannot wait to find out more about him in the sequel.

We only get to really meet this character through flashbacks, but he seems like quite the character. He’s basically Robin’s mentor. If this were Supernatural, he’d basically be Bobby. Except cooler. And blacker. Still has the same personality and sarcasm, though, and oh how I love it.

❧ There’s so many characters (point of view and otherwise) that are just thrown at the reader with no introduction or warning that I spent most of the book with absolutely no idea what was going on.

Every time a new name popped up, I had to stop and wonder whether we’d met this character yet, because they were introduced as if we should already know them. The chapters aren’t labeled whose point of view they are or when in the timeline (though this is an ARC and that might change by publication), so it often took awhile for me to figure out what was going on.

There are about 12 significant characters (not to mention all the background characters) that either have a point of view in the book or play a significant enough role to warrant mention.

This was … a lot for me, personally. My memory has sprung a leak, so struggling to remember these all and separate them threw up all sorts of warning alarms about my brain overheating.

At times, it took so long to cycle back to a character that I’d straight up forgotten who they were, which made it even more confusing. This seemed to ease up around 70% of the way through, when I had a pretty solid grasp on everyone, even though I still mixed up some people here and there.

❧ I had a really hard time getting into this (probably because I spent most of the beginning being super confused), which means the story didn’t really start for me until around 25% of the way into the book.

The beginning started with a whiz bang of action, but then it stagnated to a crawl as the book introduced a legion of characters. Sometimes too much action is just that. There was so much going on all at once that I struggled to follow everything and had to keep going back (sometimes even chapters back) to see if I’d missed something that would make a certain section make more sense.

This cyclical pattern seemed to perpetuate through the book, where there would be a lot of whiz-bang action all at once, and then it would just peter out and I would sort of lose interest in the plot.

It actually took me longer to read this than I expected, despite it not being particularly long, and it took me a while to figure out why. When it was actiony, it was hard to put down, but there were long stretches when it wasn’t, and it didn’t hold my attention.

❧ The YouTube channel struck me as an interesting twist, but I felt like it was underutilized.

This was the real twist to an otherwise mostly tropy story, I thought, but it really didn’t add that much to the book, other than to allow Robin to brag about how well she’s doing financially and so that she doesn’t have to explain over and over again what she does. Instead, she turns on a YouTube video to show them what she does.

Since the book is comped to Supernatural, I keep thinking of things in relation to that (which probably also hurt the book a little) and this feels a lot like this book’s version of the Supernatural book series in the show.

Except, you know, without the charm and backstory behind it. I loved the idea in Supernatural, because it wasn’t the brothers’ doing, and they sort of kept stumbling into people who had read the series, and it ended up being more of a running gag like … you all know this stuff is real, right?! YOU’RE WELCOME. But also … this is kind of weird and creepy.

Here, the YouTube channel is 100% Robin, knowing that no one will believe it, yet still showing it to people in order to get them to believe that what she does is real. It was such a weird dynamic for me.

❧ Everyone ends up believing Robin waaaay too easily.

Picture someone you don’t know but find attractive. Now imagine that a few hours after meeting them, they tell you they hunt witches. They show you a documentary style, Blair Witch-esque YouTube channel to prove it. What’s your first reaction?!

If you said anything other than, “Yeaaaah, okaaay,” in a really cynical voice while side-eyeing the person, you’re wrong! Wrong, I tell you! Because this is how the real world works, darn it.

This similar scenario happened over and over again, each time with Robin expecting to be rejected or treated like she’s crazy (and rightly so), only to have the person believe her, and then she was super surprised.

And so was I. I wanted a little more resistance and a bit more her earning the trust of the people around her.

Have you read this one yet? What did you think?

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