Little Heaven

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More than that, Cutter follows his dark story to its logical conclusion, giving us darker deeds than even Pennywise managed, and making his heroes more complicit and less of a symbol of good. It doesn’t exactly help the tension for the bulk of the story to know how key players turn out beforehand, but I must say that as things went along this didn’t actually bother me much.

About 80% into it, completely numbed, I was flipping pages past brilliant horror scenes just to get to the end. Outside of “No Country for Old Men” I’m not terribly acquainted with the genre, but if you have three mercenaries hired to check out a small town in the middle of nowhere, with little trust between the three of them, I feel like that just screams Western. Tucked away in the forest, our intrepid fighters learn there are savage monstrosities hidden in the woods. And Cutter does a great job drawing out all his characters including the religious leader and his henchmen.Normally when I’m really loving a book I devour it in no time but with this one I found myself purposely slowing my reading down so I could really savour each moment and wrap my brain around all the gruesome and devilish details. Slice-of-life family portraits as a prelude to existential horror, bit characters whose life stories are suddenly illustrated for us in gritty, detailed flashbacks just before that character suffers a grisly demise, and horrific monsters that are vaguely formed blobs of black unspeakable evil with a variety of powers emerging as the plot requires. Information is teased out, but we don’t learn the fine details of their experiences, nor the true nature of what they faced.

The book opens with an introduction to a trio of rough mercenaries who have reunited to stand against an evil from their past. The words alone made me visualize some pretty dark and gruesome imagery, but then there were actual illustrations throughout the novel that provided even more dark and disturbing imagery. Which all comes down to why I’m sure this is simply a case of “wrong book, wrong time” or “Sorry, Little Heaven, it’s not you, it’s me. A group of unlikely mercenaries — a black Englishman named Ebenezer, a female bounty hunter named Minerva, and a rough hired gun named Micah — are all thrown together by happenstance thanks to a drug dealer who wanted two of them to kill the third. So my advice: Hang in there past 250 pages without expecting gross-out horror all the way through, okay?She did not want him to collapse - he might fall down the steep slope and break his loathsome neck, robbing her of the opportunity to slit it later on and dance a happy jig in his fountaining blood like a child skipping around an opened fire hydrant. In the second act, fifteen years later, Eb, Minnie and Micah have to go back, because the thing in the woods has taken Micah's daughter.

A trio of mismatched mercenaries—Micah Shughrue, Minerva Atwater, and Ebenzer Elkins, colloquially known as “the Englishman”—is hired by young Ellen Bellhaven for a deceptively simple task: check in on her nephew, who may have been taken against h.

Her name is Ellen and she wants to hire him, to track down her nephew who has been trundled off to some religious cult in the outback of nowhere, New Mexico. I’m not sure if reading it during the holiday season was the best decision, but if you’re looking for something that will make your skin crawl, this is the right book for you.

The body horror violence just keeps getting worse and worse, and every once in awhile we’d be treated to some actual visuals thanks to an extremely talented illustrator…. It won’t be for all tastes – it’s wonderfully literate and careful, and too extreme for many – but for those on board with its efforts, they’ll be rewarded and then some. Little Heaven is run by one of the most vile characters - Amos Flesher - even thinking about him turns my stomach. Cutter did a great job on that front, creating an intense and all-encompassing sense of “wrongness” that never quite leaves you. In the backwoods of New Mexico in the mid-1960s a religious commune has built themselves a community to get away from the sinful world, guided by their charismatic leader Reverend Amos Flesher.If the story had been written in a more "streamlined" way, with bits about the characters past somehow interspersed throughout the story without having the reader virtually stop the action to read about, this story could have been a much more engaging read overall. It is a religious haven but, soon, something evil arrives in Little Heaven and nothing will ever be the same…. But there is something old and hungry that lives in the wilderness surrounding the compound of Little Heaven, something that doesn't want anyone to leave. Even early on, though, Cutter shows that he’s doing something different with the story, hinting that our characters didn’t just gain nightmares and trauma from that 1960’s encounter; they’ve gained something awful, some Faustian deal that’s hurt them more than helped.