The Bottom Line: Voted the year’s best horror novel in the 2024 BestThrillers.com Book Awards.
Get out the popcorn, because author T.C. Schueler has done wonders with the fear-based Y2K era by blending off-beat humor and campy horror into a novel that is hell-bent on maximizing entertainment value.
Buddies Trevor Pug and Loo Spicotti form a book club, in which the only rules are selecting an “evil” book and gathering to discuss it in a bar.
To say they don’t take their own book club seriously is un extreme understatement. The group is far better and dishing out well-intentioned digs at each other than actually reaching the material.
But while dissecting this month’s dark reading selection, seven friends are accosted by a desperate vagrant the locals know as Prophet.
When the knuckleheads rebuke the man for panhandling, Prophet curses them.
The homeless man is found dead the next day.
And one by one, the club members find out as their lives begin “going south.” It starts with an accident, alcoholism, and a funeral. Unseemly dreams begin and soon after careers are ruined, friendships severed, and secrets exposed.
Then the untimely deaths start. Enjoy.
