The premise was very cool: The evil witch eats people to make herself immortal, Hansel and Gretel are the children abandoned when the witch starts eating their mother. The introduction was frightening and exciting.

But then it all went downhill, steadily worse every page, until the ending was nearly unreadable.

The characterizations were nonexistent, the plot was stagnant, the violence was too gross to be enjoyable and too frequent to be scary, the pacing was impossibly slow. This book needed an editor to cut it down to 150 pages and it would have been a fun Halloween read.

This was my first Stephen King horror novel. (I know, I'm ashamed of me too.) This was both exactly what I expected and more horrifying than I could have imagined, and I would not recommend to those with weak stomachs. That being said, it was a fascinating exploration of what the mind and the body can endure, and how cruel a person can be. King did an amazing job of blending sheer terror with even-keeled moments that made the novel read like a hot day with occasional gusts of air; not enough to keep you cool, but enough to keep you outside.

For being 21 and 30, the main characters acted like they were 12 and 13. The sex scenes were so bad they felt like they were fanfiction written by someone who has never had sex. Maybelle was emotionally abused by Edmund simply because she wanted time to think about being married and he couldn't handle the fact that she wasn't killing herself to be with him. There were tons of typos and grammatical errors that drove me up the wall. Giving it two stars because Maybelle's grandmother was pretty cool and I enjoyed her school and its students (minus Edmund).

I cried.