Chasing Demons

I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review

The memory of that figure standing in the doorway came back to him and he shivered, remembering what had unfolded next.

Chasing Demons was a gruesome story that started to get lost in it's scifi, supernatural, horror, and emotional drama weaving. The story starts off with a fifteen year old Joel, who's currently in a centre for adolescent mental health. He's trying to deal with the death of his father, which he can't fully remember, and just walking out of a session with the psychiatrist that churned him up emotionally. In the commons room, a kid that likes to bully Joel and a huge six foot five kid are also getting riled up. As tensions rise, Joel suddenly finds himself out in the hallway sitting up after having blacking out and seeing the carnage of something that ransacked, ripping apart bodies, and murdering the occupants of the room, with only him, the bully, a nurse, and the six foot five kid surviving. The story then jumps twenty-three years to an adult Joel who's a teacher, amicably divorced with an eight year old daughter, and just learning that the psychiatrist who treated him in that centre, has been ripped apart murdered, just like the bodies in that commons room. This time however, the six foot five kid that was blamed for the murders, killed himself in prison years ago, so the question of who or what is to blame is coming back unanswered.

“It’ll follow you if you let it. Stay out of the shadows and you’ll be okay, ’cause it hides in the shadows.”

This had some gruesome horror moments, with all the body ripping apart, and some animal cruelty, so reader beware. There were multiple point-of-views, Joel, the bully, police detective, and various other secondary characters getting pulled into the horror to give a pretty rounded out scope of the story. Joel obviously dominates the povs, as the murders that keep happening in his hometown that he goes back to, on the advice of his new therapist to deal with the death of his father, seem to stem from connections to him. A lot of the hows and whys is kept to the shadows until the later half of the book and I thought it all got a little a messy with the scifi mad scientist aspects and the overall messaging of deal with your personal demons or they're are going to deal with you.

“I told him that— he’ll never, ever outrun it.”

I enjoyed the interpersonal relationships touched on for some emotional bulking up but some secondary characters felt at turns a little intrusive and underutilized. The police detectives helped to add keeping track of facts but I think the reader could have handled it on their own and while a main villain and accompaniment were the conductors of the horror, their revealed purpose never fully felt developed. If you like gruesome horror with messaging this would scratch that itch, even if I thought all the genre weaving got a little messy.