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cowboyjonah 's review for:

Woom by Duncan Ralston
2.0

I was going to give this 2 stars up until the last 10 pages. They didn't make up for the whole book, but definitely made more of an impression than the rest of the book did. It's a short read comprised of a bunch of weird short stories told by the same narrator under a different name. I went into this thinking it was going to be more of an extreme horror, splatterpunk novel and it wasn't that. It had some disturbing stories, but not up to the level that I think a lot of reviews on the book said. I almost gave this 2 stars because of this. I felt like it was a little boring. It was also pretty predictable, by the abortion story you can tell that Angel is all of the characters in the story he is telling, and from then on the reveal doesn't seem as big. The thing with Angels speech impediment also seemed random and not necessary other than creating a weird book title. I didn't love either main character, Angel or Shyla. Little to no character development in either one, and what was supposed to make me feel bad for Angel in the stories didn't have that effect. Since the stories were so short, when I felt like I was supposed to be attached to the characters in them I wasn't. I kept waiting for a big finish, and even the end wasn't what I felt it was going to be. It was unexpected, which I appreciated. I added another star for the ending because it was weird and the last few lines were some of the best in the book. Some of the stories I felt had sexual assault thrown in them just for the sake of it, adding little to nothing to the actual stories. I wouldn't consider it extreme horror, but there were some disturbing parts.