“They Kill plunges readers deep into the heart of pulse pounding supernatural horror with a story that could only come from the mind of Tim Waggoner.” — This is HorrorWhat are you willing to do, what are you willing to become, to save someone you love?Sierra Sowell’s dead brother Jeffrey is resurrected by a mysterious man known only as Corliss. Corliss also transforms four people in Sierra’s life … Corliss. Corliss also transforms four people in Sierra’s life into inhuman monsters determined to kill her. Sierra and Jeffrey’s boyfriend Marc work to discover the reason for her brother’s return to life while struggling to survive attacks by this monstrous quartet.
Corliss gives Sierra a chance to make Jeffrey’s resurrection permanent – if she makes a dreadful bargain. Can she do what it will take to save her brother, no matter how much blood is shed along the way?
FLAME TREE PRESS is the new fiction imprint of Flame Tree Publishing. Launched in 2018 the list brings together brilliant new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices.
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This book has elements of urban fantasy, cosmic horror, science fiction, zombie fiction, and gross-you-out horror.
Waggoner gives us a whole slew of scary bad guys, and I “enjoyed” (and was grossed out by) Waggoner’s creativity. I think the scariest bad guy is the silver man who is half-man half-android. (Imagine something like Siri or Alexa melding with your mind and body, yikes!)
This is a fast-paced story with danger or blood on every page. The murderous characters kept me turning pages long after my bedtime.
I love the ending. I know far-fetched story lines aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I think it’s so clever, and it ties everything together. (And it’d make a GREAT movie!)
The only reason I didn’t give They Kill five stars is the way the timeline is structured, it makes it hard to connect with Sierra in the first part of the book. It seems like she’s just reacting to her situation. Yes, wanting to survive is a good motivator, but it’s not as good as her motivation later on when all is revealed.
Overall, They Kill is an enjoyable, gory horror novel that’s hard to put down, but to get the most out of it, you must read clear through to the end. Four enjoyable, gory stars!
Tim Waggoner is one of my favorite writers because of the uniqueness of his stories. They are this type of dark and fantastical horror with deep rooted, character driven plots.
I enjoyed the characters in the story but found the story to be too unbelievable. When the guy grew a charger cord in his mouth so he could shoot it into people’s heads to drain their life force….. Well I just stopped reading.
3.5/5
“Even in her darkest moment, she was still capable of love.”
I’m a bit ashamed to admit this is my first Tim Waggoner read. I have a bunch of his books on my TBR but just haven’t arrived at them yet. I was kindly approved for an ARC of this through Flametree over on Netgalley and slotted it in to read and review for what I thought was an August release date.
Then I realized I’d confused it with Hellrider and saw that it, in fact, had an end of July release!
So I bumped it way up and dove in.
At its heart ‘They Kill’ has an amazing story about loss, grief and the depths of despair people suffer when dealing with the death of a loved one. In this case, Waggoner delivered two such tales of suffering; Sierra & Marc. Jeffrey was killed in a horrific car crash one year ago. Brother to Sierra, significant other to Marc, now the two of them wake up on his anniversary and try and figure out how to get through the day.
I really felt that this plot point would have been the basis of the entire story and if it had been, I think I would have eaten this book up. Seriously – stop and think; if your most loved person in this world unexpectedly died – and then one year later you see them walking down the street, how would you respond?
Unfortunately for me, the book itself started off on the wrong foot. I was hoping it would change, heck I even tweeted about digging it at 20%, but that was right as we were really getting the back story of Sierra, Marc & Jeffrey.
The book starts off with some weird rash decisions/characterizations towards Sierra by some secondary characters – mainly Grace & Stuart. Both have this unexpected over the top hatred towards Sierra. Throw in some completely random twists (which I don’t think are spoilers as it’s in the synopsis) where Grace develops powers and Stuart becomes this weird Cyborg with a digital assistant named Krista and I was confused.
But time and time again, Tim kept pulling me back in. Learning more about Corliss and Jeffrey and the realm rift. Then seeing what happens when Randall is affected was a great narrative push. Waggoner kept digging the story hooks into me and I was hoping we’d be able to move away from Grace & Stuart. I was even hoping for more storyline with Karolyn. But then we are introduced to Mandy, a sex-crazed succubus and the ship started to sink. Sadly there were a number of times I thought I was going to DNF.
The ending both frustrated me as well as excited me. I can’t talk too much about it for fear of moving into full spoiler territory but again – I think if Tim could have lost a lot of the extra stuff, this would have been such a great read. When all was said and done, I almost longed for the book to have been a novella instead.
Oh well. I’m still really looking forward to the other books I have by Tim, and if you read the synopsis and it sounds like a book you’d enjoy – then definitely check it out!