The Reyes Incident by Briana Morgan

I am not a usual straight-up horror (I’m more dark fantasy or horror thriller etc) reader, so not sure why this made it onto my TBR, but I bought it and read it in more or less one night. (150 pages) It felt short to me, more like a novella with the skeleton of a solid story that needed more flesh.

Interesting angle here with a main character military police having issues with her wife. She is assigned a case where a girl was found outside of Dawsonville Forest (wherein lies an abandoned military bunker) covered in the blood of her friends, and large parts of the book are Liv (the found girl) retelling what happened to her inside the bunker.

So let me be honest– there were some persistent story-mechanics and character-building issues I had that really impacted the creep factor of Liv’s journey. The set-up, youtube urban explorers going inside an abandoned water-logged bunker is super creepy. Kudos for that and what they find there 🙂

The timeline was a little weird, in tandem with some military-police policy stuff that also seemed a little weird (and if I, who knows little about military or police procedure was having to suspend disbelief that folks were assigned to this case in this way, and that witnesses were questioned for a month on a story that should have taken two hours tops to convey…well..let’s just say it impacted my enjoyment when I was rolling my eyes).

The emotional reactions of all the characters were….skewed for me. There seemed to be more tension build up and emotional reaction to Liv having a rival camera-woman and folks (despite being surrounded by blood and chewed up body parts) confessing love to each other than seeing their literal friends torn limb from limb….so yeah…not sure about the character-building.

And what was with Liv’s wife’s reaction to helping her investigate a bunker where kids were torn limb from limb in order to exonerate the woman basically coming between her and Liv? Hmm……..

So a bit uneven in terms of character for me, and since I’m a character-driven reader (rather than straight up entertained by gore, monsters, and creepiness– I like the emotional reactions of the characters to the blood/monster) this one wasn’t quite right for me. If you are primarily a blood/monster fan, this short little read will likely be more entertaining.