“Day or night, dead was dead.” Deep in the heart of Appalachia, stands a crooked farmhouse miles from any road. The Morrows keep to themselves, and it’s served them well so far. When girls go missing off the side...

“Day or night, dead was dead.”

Deep in the heart of Appalachia, stands a crooked farmhouse miles from any road. The Morrows keep to themselves, and it’s served them well so far. When girls go missing off the side of the highway, the cops don’t knock on their door. Which is a good thing, seeing as to what’s buried in the Morrows’ backyard. But nineteen-year-old Michael Morrow isn’t like the rest of his family. He doesn’t take pleasure in the screams that echo through the trees. Michael pines for normalcy, and he’s sure that someday he’ll see the world beyond West Virginia. When he meets Alice, a pretty girl working at a record shop in the small nearby town of Dahlia, he’s immediately smitten. For a moment, he nearly forgets about the monster he’s become. But his brother, Rebel, is all too eager to remind Michael of his place…

Well, I was not sure what to expect with this one. It was a different style writing that I have not read before. This is an incredibly dark story about a terrible family who does some terrible things. There is some gruesome situations with plenty of harm to women and animals. The novel reads like a slow burning character study, focusing on the interactions within this dysfunctional family. I never became fully immersed in the narrative, but readers with more interest in the southern rural stories may enjoy this one more than I did. While I enjoy reading dark stories, this novel demonstrated that simply containing “disturbing subject matter” is not enough to hook me into a narrative. I’m not generally a squeamish reader, but parts of Brother had me cringing in my chair.

I gave this novel a 3.5 star rating. Although the story was initially a little slow, it did get better and have quite a number of plot twists along the way, so I’d say it was a pretty good read. It’s almost as if Ahlborn had a brainstorming session to think up the worst possible actions humans can commit and started tying them into the plot. And she really took it far. Even I got a goosebumps.

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