Title: We Are Monsters
Author: Brian Kirk
Genre: Horror
Age Group: Adult (18+)
Rating: 3 stars
Purchase: Amazon
Review copy provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
The Apocalypse has come to the Sugar Hill mental asylum.
He’s the hospital’s newest, and most notorious, patient—a paranoid schizophrenic who sees humanity’s dark side.
Luckily he’s in good hands. Dr. Eli Alpert has a talent for healing tortured souls. And his protégé is working on a cure for schizophrenia, a drug that returns patients to their former selves. But unforeseen side effects are starting to emerge. Forcing prior traumas to the surface. Setting inner demons free.
Monsters have been unleashed inside the Sugar Hill mental asylum. They don’t have fangs or claws. They look just like you or me.
In We Are Monsters, psychologist Alex spent a great deal of time working on a cure for schizophrenia. The medicine seems to working, but only for a while, and then the patient gets worse. Alex is determined to make the formula a succes, though, even if that means going behind the back of Dr. Eli Alpert, the chief psychologist of the psychiatric hospital they both work in. When a new patient arrives, a violent criminal who killed several people because voices in his mind told him to, one of Alex’s co-workers persuades him to use the formula on this man, nicknamed The Apocalypse Killer, but then things start going wrong, and Alex finds out his formula might be a lot more dangerous than he ever thought possible.
The book isn’t bad, and the concept is actually pretty original, about a formula going wrong. The setting of the mental asylum, Sugar Hill, works well too, and I enjoyed reading about how the doctors had to deal with a streak of madness too, and what that did to them. However, I didn’t enjoy the characters that much. They all seemed, with the exception of Eli, rather egotistical, and not the right people fit to take care of the mentally ill. Especially Alex only had his own concerns at heart.
The first part of the book is a little slow-paced, but the pacing picked up in the middle when all hell brooke loss. The author did an admirable job with the descriptions of the characters and scenes. Some of the conversations dwindled on for too long now, and I couldn’t relate to most of the characters. Eli was the only one I could somewhat relate to, and even then, he seemed too honorable to be real, like he was a perfect male version of a Mary Sue whereas all the other characters had way too many flaws.
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