Book Review for “Mary: An Awakening of Terror” by Nat Cassidy

As far as I’m concerned, it’s spooky season now. I want ALL of the creepy stories I can get so when Tiktok recommended Mary: An Awakening of Terror by Nat Cassidy, I was interested. Unfortunately, though, every time I read something that’s highly recommended on Tiktok, it ends up being hot garbage. Even though this book is heavily inspired by Stephen King’s Carrie, which I love, that wasn’t enough to make me enjoy it🥴 This review will have slight spoilers.

Synopsis:

Mary is a quiet, middle-aged woman doing her best to blend into the background. Unremarkable. Invisible. Unknown even to herself. But lately, things have been changing inside Mary. Along with the hot flashes and body aches, she can’t look in a mirror without passing out, and the voices in her head have been urging her to do unspeakable things. Fired from her job in New York, she moves back to her hometown, hoping to reconnect with her past and inner self. Instead, visions of terrifying, mutilated specters overwhelm her with increasing regularity and she begins auto-writing strange thoughts and phrases. Mary discovers that these experiences are echoes of an infamous serial killer. Then the killings begin again. Mary’s definitely going to find herself.

My Thoughts:

• Rating- 

Was this the worst book I’ve ever read? No but it sure wasn’t the best. I thought the idea of a middle aged protagonist was very interesting; especially because it’s obvious from the beginning that Mary has something more going on. She’s an unreliable narrator and for the majority of the story it’s unclear if she’s mentally unwell or if it’s something supernatural going on with her. I actually liked Mary’s character overall, even though she was pretty dull. The characters in general were fine. I mean, they were absolutely insane… but fine. It was the story itself that was the problem.

This book simply tried to do too much. It has serial killers, a cult, ghosts, zombies, a ton of side characters and side quests that don’t really matter. There’s also quite a bit of gratuitous gore, which is something that I personally don’t enjoy and I don’t feel it added anything to the story. Things moved at a pretty fast pace for the first half or so but after that point, the storyline got convoluted and while there was a lot going on, it was somehow very boring. I skimmed the last parts of the book so I could finish faster and I have to say, I thought the ending was really dumb and unsatisfying.

Final Thoughts:

I was hoping for much more but honestly, almost every book I’ve read this year has been awful so I’m not surprised that this one was too🙃 If you have any excellent book suggestions for me, please let me know! Thanks for reading!