Review: Mercy House by Adam Cesare

 Mercy House by Adam Cesare

My Rating: 


I received a free copy of Mercy House from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Let me just set the scene for you. Picture if you will a care facility full of elderly residents who for some inexplicable reason start to go through a change. They grow taller, stronger and their baser primal instincts come to the forefront. This results in them going on a killing spree that involves a lot of sex and violence. The reader is treated to many a scene of geriatric sex, orgies, cannibalism, violence, murder and torture.

As a horror fan, I have read plenty books full of gore and violence over the years but there has to be a reason for it happening. It can't just be thrown in for the hell of it or for the shock value. It doesn't work. This is where I had a huge problem with Mercy House. There was very little plot to speak of, it was just page after page of blood and violence that didn't seem tie into anything or have a reasonable explanation.

Not once during the whole book is an explanation given as to why the elderly patients have changed. Is it a virus? Is it supernatural? Mass hysteria? Come on, give me something. If you're going to have characters going off the rails in such an extreme way, you have to explain why!

I had a feeling that this was going to be the outcome before I was even half way through the book. I was dithering at one point whether to carry on reading, but I did. I stuck with it thinking that surely the author would give the reader a reasonable explanation for all that was happening before the end of the book. He didn't.

Not one I would recommend.


Reviews also posted to my blog: Scarlet's Web
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