Review of The Merciless by Danielle Vega

Format: eBook
Genres: contemporary, horror
Pages: 336
Publisher: Razorbill
Release Date: 07/08/2014
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Brooklyn Stevens sits in a pool of her own blood, tied up and gagged. No one outside of these dank basement walls knows she’s here. No one can hear her scream.

Sofia Flores knows she shouldn’t have gotten involved. When she befriended Riley, Grace, and Alexis on her first day at school, she admired them, with their perfect hair and their good-girl ways. They said they wanted to save Brooklyn. They wanted to help her. Sofia didn’t realize they believed Brooklyn was possessed.

Now, Riley and the girls are performing an exorcism on Brooklyn - but their idea of an exorcism is closer to torture than salvation. All Sofia wants is to get out of this house. But there is no way out. Sofia can’t go against the other girls... unless she wants to be next...

New girl in town Sofia quickly makes friends with a religious group of girls, who turn out to be a whole lot more religious than she expected. Locked in a house while the leader tries to perform an exorcism - or rather, torture - Sofia finds herself trying to help Brooklyn while avoiding being the next in line. This book is grisly, but great for fans of horror movies.

There's no real emotion in this book. I wasn't connected to any of the characters and each seemed more than a little cardboard - the new girl in town, the obsessive religious girl, the outcast - overall this smelt strongly of a debut novel, which is surprisingly, not true. This book is all for the shock and awe, whereas I'd prefer to read a book with less blood and pain and more fleshed out characters.

I am a horror movie fan myself, but I feel that horror movies can get away with blood and guts and very little storyline - for a book it doesn't really work. There is sure a lot of blood and pain though, some of the most I've read in a young adult book. The author tries for another horror movie style plot twist at the end of the book, which was interesting but weak, I felt.

Telling us that the girls were going to perform a twisted exorcism was a clever enough grabber to make us read the book, but that meant that for a good thirty to forty percent of the book I was waiting for that to happen while the author kind of set the story up. Overall, it's an interesting camp fire read but nothing that I found particularly memorable. It will be interesting to see where this series goes though.