Year 5, week 31: Stolen Tongues

This week's book:
Stolen Tongues
By Felix Blackwell

This book was a buddy read for my online book challenge group. I had never heard of it before, and hardly knew anything about it before I started it. 

The book is about a couple who go on a romantic getaway and end up with a dark force following them. The book is based on the author and his fiancée, and her history of sleepwalking and night terrors. The author wanted to make the sleepwalker/talker to say and do creepy things an average person that sleepwalks/talks and her body to have odd movements, but not seem possessed. The book originally was a series of short stories on Creepypasta (which is a website that has tons of scary stories). 

I read horror off and on, and normally there are some creepy moments, but as a whole an entire book doesn't normally scare me. Well, this book was so freaking creepy! Like the whole book creeped me out. 

The fun thing is that I was able to do a very small (like six other people) Zoom discussion with the author. He is young and so down to Earth and sweet. He even offered to send us all free e-books of his other novel. (I will have to follow up if that really happens). The author thought our culture has gotten so desensitized to gore and he wanted to write a whole book with just sounds and voices. He wanted to write something creepy. He said he just can't write gore porn; it just makes him sick. I thought that sounded so cool because I'm so tired of the gory stuff. He wanted to make his readers feel isolated and feel alone while they read his books. He is a bit embarrassed that the book became such a hit because he feels like it wasn't written as well as his other books. 

There is a native American subplot in the novel. Three of the main characters are from the same tribe and he does a good job of writing them, and he didn't use the common stereotypes that are used in fiction. The author actually spent a whole chapter after the book to explain he has studied native American history in grad school and he wanted to bring more strong characters into mainstream fiction.

There is going to be a prequel to this book in about a year. He says if you liked this book you might not like the prequel, and vice versa. There are way more characters and a third person perspective, instead of the small cast and first person perspective of Stolen Tongues. This prequel has lots of indigenous people, women, and LGBTQ characters as well. 

I very much liked this book. I would definitely recommend this if you want to be creeped out. 

P.S. my youngest daughter wanted to join in on our meeting, but tuckered herself out.