What do you think?
Rate this book
Broken Angel
She was a mystery from the start.
They found her at a roadside diner outside the small Idaho town of Clearwater, drugged and abandoned, with no memory of who she is or where she came from.
But was she a miracle?
She inspires violence with her presence, madness with a touch. As her health improves and her memories return, the hot Clearwater summer becomes increasingly strange and violent. Insanity infects the small town, a shadowy figure lurking in the woods deals death, and no one is safe.
"The author of Dragonfly and Feral shows his skill at small-town horror." Library Journal.
They found her at a roadside diner outside the small Idaho town of Clearwater, drugged and abandoned, with no memory of who she is or where she came from.
But was she a miracle?
She inspires violence with her presence, madness with a touch. As her health improves and her memories return, the hot Clearwater summer becomes increasingly strange and violent. Insanity infects the small town, a shadowy figure lurking in the woods deals death, and no one is safe.
"The author of Dragonfly and Feral shows his skill at small-town horror." Library Journal.
266 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
50 people want to read
About the author
Brian Knight
97 books68 followersBrian Knight lives in Washington State with his family and the voices in his head. His favorite things include coffee, writing outdoors on warm summer nights, and Hawaiian shirts. Find him online at www.Brian-Knight.com.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 1, 2022
3.5 stars. It kept me intrigued almost the entire time, but didn't quite find the end memorable. But an okay horror-ish book for this time of year
March 6, 2018
I think this is an excellent horror novel ! It is written well and had a great plot and well rounded characters for such a short novel . I left it wishing It had been 2 or 3 hundred pages longer . I will be reading more Brian Knight in the near future .
February 21, 2014
Okay, this book was a shot in the dark, and because I was in the mood for a good ghost story, I thought maybe this book, classified as horror, would fill that need.
I couldn't say if a lot of the things in this book were stereotypical or not, considering I don't know many horror book tropes, but even I wasn't surprised by any events in this book, or even intrigued in any of the characters. It took place in a small town, where this girl appears, and is adopted by a woman who is foster mom to the main character and his brother. And then strange things start to happen ie. people start to die.
That's more or less ALL you need to know about the book. I came in with a mild idea of what it would be about, and I left the book with a very strong impression of not-surprise that I could have gotten. Everything happened as I supposed it would, and all these assumptions that I made (that turned out to be true) were based off of my VERY limited idea of what a small town horror book about people dying would be about. It may be because it's a small town that it was so predictable. Closed environment without a lot of outside interference, the sense of exclusion for outsiders who would immediately be pegged and outcasted when things start to go awry, the gossip that spreads and isolates an individual who was close to the strange deaths, and of course everyone dies.
The characters could have all been described in a single sentence, and almost all of them (I may even go further and say ALL of them) filled a stereotype. Grim, the delinquent adolescent boy, who is an orphan and an outsider. Danny, the older brother policeman type who tries and fails to fix things. Michele the girl who became ostracized and picked on because of her proximity to the first strange death. Clara the kind hearted woman who adopts orphans. And then there's Angel, the source of all the misfortune on the town, who plays the part of tortured soul, who doesn't even TRY to put on a brave face, and constantly blames herself.
Part of the reason I even bothered to give this book 2 stars is because at least these characters had some sort of personality (which is better than some other books I've read). The thing that kept that rating from going any higher, was because none of them changed at all during this time of dire circumstances. Those sentences I wrote up there are okay characters. It's enough for you to look at them and think "Oh, okay, a little bit stereotypical, but it's only the beginning of the book, I'm sure they can develop and change a little bit." But none of them did.
While the rest of the town also behaved as a small town in the grips of slow boiling crisis would behave, I fully expected them to start rioting, to lynch the person everyone knew was responsible, especially when kids started to die. But they didn't. They all settled to their gossip, and just left the incompetent (of course) law enforcement with next to nothing to do except bicker amongst themselves and find the dead bodies. There was even that scene where the young rookie cop (Danny) frustrated with the protocols of being law enforcement, threw in his badge and decided to act on his own justice. Not that he did anything either. He went into his cabin in the mountains but still came down when his foster mom had issues, and still obeyed the acting sheriff. What was the point of that action if he didn't actively try to do something?
The histories of the characters and how they surfaced was almost pointless too, almost like Knight threw them in there to flesh out the characters to prove to the readers that there was a reason that the characters were acting or feeling this way. Michele, for instance, was already feeling the stress of going from having friends to everyone suspecting and hating her, and then on top of that, we discover that she had an abusive father who beat her mother, and she would occasionally dream of killing her father. Or Grim, who on top of being an orphan, was kidnapped as a child by a homeless man and spent years hiding in this dumpster probably being abused by the homeless men who lived there, before he killed the 'Rag Man" (the homeless guy who kidnapped him) and then escaped to the small town. I can't relate to a boy like that. Why do authors feel the need to give their protagonists such an awful and tragic backstory? It might make us pity them, but it won't help us to relate or even like them.
I hated the random romance that suddenly sparked up between Michele and Grim. Michele felt like Grim was the only person in the world that she could trust, and she's always been in love with him she just didn't realize it yet, and oh when she found out she tried to smother it like a teenager who discovers that she has a crush on this boy would smother their emotions IN PRACTICALLY EVERY OTHER ORDINARY SCENARIO. And Grim felt it too, and there was this entire subplot where he and Michele would sneak into each other's homes just to catch a moment alone. It's fine if they can find love despite the trials and difficulties surrounding them, but like Jasmine in the musical twisted said, "I'm not going to have sex in the middle of a battle!" If you're pretty sure that someone's out there, killing people indiscriminately, you don't go find your soulmate and elope, that just makes no sense.
And then there's Angel. The girl who is painted to the readers like this tragic figure, the girl who didn't want the bad things to happen, who knows that it's all her fault and is so assured of it, but never quite explains why its her fault (and no one even bothers to ask her why its her fault, even the ones who love her and want to protect her from the glares of the rest of the town, they just automatically assume, yeah it's her fault, but she's this precious little girl and she can't do anything about it, so we don't want to press her for details). She's such an integral part of the story, the source of everything, and yet she spends the first half in a drug-induced catatonic state, so we have no idea what her personality is, but already the main characters are protective of her. And then when she regains consciousness and you can start to see her personality, it's just this timid, innocent girl who has no opinions on anything and doesn't do anything at all to right her situation. She spends the second half apologizing profusely for something that we the readers have no freaking idea that she's apologizing for. She is the cursed damsel in distress who doesn't try, and all the people who matter in this book care about her. And while the biggest mystery was where she came from, it was only ever investigated by one person (Danny) and only between the narrative heavy bits where people went insane and died. WE never learn anything about her.
Even to the end, I still don't know specifically what it is that causes the people around her to die. Does she cause people to go crazy? Does she bring their nightmares into reality? Does she unconsciously bring out their fears that kills them? When she says "I tried to stop it!" what did she exactly try to do to try to stop it? What is "it"? The first death was an old man who tried to strangle Angel for absolutely no reason, except that he went crazy. The second one was a dog who was beaten to death, the third was Grim's friend who was locked away in a dead machine and left to die and rot, the fourth and fifth were found maimed, the sixth killed herself when she confronted Angel and tried to attack her... The sixth was Danny (oh yay, killed the only person who tried to do anything in this entire book) who was shot by another police officer who was jealous of danny and had only ever been out to get him, and that guy died very quickly because... Angel boiled him to death with her hands? I don't know what the hell she did. It felt like Knight just wanted to write some gruesome bits into the book.
There was a group of people who came out at the end of the book, asking for Angel. It wasn't the towns folk though (why the hell wouldn't the townsfolk, the ones who are directly affected by all the deaths, not demand the girl, or even try to kill her?), it was some officers or vigilantes from a town over, men with no faces, no mentions in the entire book, but still knew about the girl. They only asked for Grim to hand the girl over. Didn't ask Grim to stand aside, didn't raise their guns to point at Angel and Grim. What did they plan on doing? Taking her someplace far far away? It wasn't nearly vicious enough for the climax of the story. And of course Grim manages to fend off all four of them, with his revolver and doesn't get hit once. But he still dies. He takes Angel and his dead girlfriend (who was killed by her mom who was trying to protect her...?) into the cabin and literally waits for the people to find him, and they shoot him down.
Of course, once he dies, and the people think they've saved Angel, we discover Angel's secret power. Along with whatever hell she does to make people die, she also has the power to BRING PEOPLE BACK TO LIFE. I wish I was kidding. As if it wasn't enough that she was the picture of innocence, the center of the death and insanity, she can also bring people back from the dead. And "She remembered, bringing people back took more out of her than putting people there". As if that would explain everything. (It doesn't) The icing on the cake is when Angel brings back Michelle, but can't bring back Grim because he's been shot to death, so now there's this Romeo and Juliet scenario.
It was a passable read, this book. I plodded along with the minor hope that it would get better, and if I was fan of horror books, I'd probably rate it even lower, if possible. I would probably never read this book again.
I couldn't say if a lot of the things in this book were stereotypical or not, considering I don't know many horror book tropes, but even I wasn't surprised by any events in this book, or even intrigued in any of the characters. It took place in a small town, where this girl appears, and is adopted by a woman who is foster mom to the main character and his brother. And then strange things start to happen ie. people start to die.
That's more or less ALL you need to know about the book. I came in with a mild idea of what it would be about, and I left the book with a very strong impression of not-surprise that I could have gotten. Everything happened as I supposed it would, and all these assumptions that I made (that turned out to be true) were based off of my VERY limited idea of what a small town horror book about people dying would be about. It may be because it's a small town that it was so predictable. Closed environment without a lot of outside interference, the sense of exclusion for outsiders who would immediately be pegged and outcasted when things start to go awry, the gossip that spreads and isolates an individual who was close to the strange deaths, and of course everyone dies.
The characters could have all been described in a single sentence, and almost all of them (I may even go further and say ALL of them) filled a stereotype. Grim, the delinquent adolescent boy, who is an orphan and an outsider. Danny, the older brother policeman type who tries and fails to fix things. Michele the girl who became ostracized and picked on because of her proximity to the first strange death. Clara the kind hearted woman who adopts orphans. And then there's Angel, the source of all the misfortune on the town, who plays the part of tortured soul, who doesn't even TRY to put on a brave face, and constantly blames herself.
Part of the reason I even bothered to give this book 2 stars is because at least these characters had some sort of personality (which is better than some other books I've read). The thing that kept that rating from going any higher, was because none of them changed at all during this time of dire circumstances. Those sentences I wrote up there are okay characters. It's enough for you to look at them and think "Oh, okay, a little bit stereotypical, but it's only the beginning of the book, I'm sure they can develop and change a little bit." But none of them did.
While the rest of the town also behaved as a small town in the grips of slow boiling crisis would behave, I fully expected them to start rioting, to lynch the person everyone knew was responsible, especially when kids started to die. But they didn't. They all settled to their gossip, and just left the incompetent (of course) law enforcement with next to nothing to do except bicker amongst themselves and find the dead bodies. There was even that scene where the young rookie cop (Danny) frustrated with the protocols of being law enforcement, threw in his badge and decided to act on his own justice. Not that he did anything either. He went into his cabin in the mountains but still came down when his foster mom had issues, and still obeyed the acting sheriff. What was the point of that action if he didn't actively try to do something?
The histories of the characters and how they surfaced was almost pointless too, almost like Knight threw them in there to flesh out the characters to prove to the readers that there was a reason that the characters were acting or feeling this way. Michele, for instance, was already feeling the stress of going from having friends to everyone suspecting and hating her, and then on top of that, we discover that she had an abusive father who beat her mother, and she would occasionally dream of killing her father. Or Grim, who on top of being an orphan, was kidnapped as a child by a homeless man and spent years hiding in this dumpster probably being abused by the homeless men who lived there, before he killed the 'Rag Man" (the homeless guy who kidnapped him) and then escaped to the small town. I can't relate to a boy like that. Why do authors feel the need to give their protagonists such an awful and tragic backstory? It might make us pity them, but it won't help us to relate or even like them.
I hated the random romance that suddenly sparked up between Michele and Grim. Michele felt like Grim was the only person in the world that she could trust, and she's always been in love with him she just didn't realize it yet, and oh when she found out she tried to smother it like a teenager who discovers that she has a crush on this boy would smother their emotions IN PRACTICALLY EVERY OTHER ORDINARY SCENARIO. And Grim felt it too, and there was this entire subplot where he and Michele would sneak into each other's homes just to catch a moment alone. It's fine if they can find love despite the trials and difficulties surrounding them, but like Jasmine in the musical twisted said, "I'm not going to have sex in the middle of a battle!" If you're pretty sure that someone's out there, killing people indiscriminately, you don't go find your soulmate and elope, that just makes no sense.
And then there's Angel. The girl who is painted to the readers like this tragic figure, the girl who didn't want the bad things to happen, who knows that it's all her fault and is so assured of it, but never quite explains why its her fault (and no one even bothers to ask her why its her fault, even the ones who love her and want to protect her from the glares of the rest of the town, they just automatically assume, yeah it's her fault, but she's this precious little girl and she can't do anything about it, so we don't want to press her for details). She's such an integral part of the story, the source of everything, and yet she spends the first half in a drug-induced catatonic state, so we have no idea what her personality is, but already the main characters are protective of her. And then when she regains consciousness and you can start to see her personality, it's just this timid, innocent girl who has no opinions on anything and doesn't do anything at all to right her situation. She spends the second half apologizing profusely for something that we the readers have no freaking idea that she's apologizing for. She is the cursed damsel in distress who doesn't try, and all the people who matter in this book care about her. And while the biggest mystery was where she came from, it was only ever investigated by one person (Danny) and only between the narrative heavy bits where people went insane and died. WE never learn anything about her.
Even to the end, I still don't know specifically what it is that causes the people around her to die. Does she cause people to go crazy? Does she bring their nightmares into reality? Does she unconsciously bring out their fears that kills them? When she says "I tried to stop it!" what did she exactly try to do to try to stop it? What is "it"? The first death was an old man who tried to strangle Angel for absolutely no reason, except that he went crazy. The second one was a dog who was beaten to death, the third was Grim's friend who was locked away in a dead machine and left to die and rot, the fourth and fifth were found maimed, the sixth killed herself when she confronted Angel and tried to attack her... The sixth was Danny (oh yay, killed the only person who tried to do anything in this entire book) who was shot by another police officer who was jealous of danny and had only ever been out to get him, and that guy died very quickly because... Angel boiled him to death with her hands? I don't know what the hell she did. It felt like Knight just wanted to write some gruesome bits into the book.
There was a group of people who came out at the end of the book, asking for Angel. It wasn't the towns folk though (why the hell wouldn't the townsfolk, the ones who are directly affected by all the deaths, not demand the girl, or even try to kill her?), it was some officers or vigilantes from a town over, men with no faces, no mentions in the entire book, but still knew about the girl. They only asked for Grim to hand the girl over. Didn't ask Grim to stand aside, didn't raise their guns to point at Angel and Grim. What did they plan on doing? Taking her someplace far far away? It wasn't nearly vicious enough for the climax of the story. And of course Grim manages to fend off all four of them, with his revolver and doesn't get hit once. But he still dies. He takes Angel and his dead girlfriend (who was killed by her mom who was trying to protect her...?) into the cabin and literally waits for the people to find him, and they shoot him down.
Of course, once he dies, and the people think they've saved Angel, we discover Angel's secret power. Along with whatever hell she does to make people die, she also has the power to BRING PEOPLE BACK TO LIFE. I wish I was kidding. As if it wasn't enough that she was the picture of innocence, the center of the death and insanity, she can also bring people back from the dead. And "She remembered, bringing people back took more out of her than putting people there". As if that would explain everything. (It doesn't) The icing on the cake is when Angel brings back Michelle, but can't bring back Grim because he's been shot to death, so now there's this Romeo and Juliet scenario.
It was a passable read, this book. I plodded along with the minor hope that it would get better, and if I was fan of horror books, I'd probably rate it even lower, if possible. I would probably never read this book again.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 30, 2009
Brian Knight, Broken Angel (Delirium, 2007)
Like many obsessive bookies, I have a tendency to keep lists. On one of them I jot down titles that I hear about that sound great, but that I can't yet find at Amazon. Way back in 2004, I first heard buzz about a book called Broken Angel, by a chap I'd never heard of called Brian Knight. It sounded fantastic, and it was the book with which I began keeping that particular list. Here it is five years later, and my library picked up copies. (In fact, they picked up as many copies as they do of successful midlist authors—twenty-five. Kudos to Mr. Knight.) The book has had five years to stew in the back of my head, and as usual with such things, by the time I got my hands on it, I figured it was probably the best thing since sliced bread. It's not, and if I make the attempt to divorce the lionization I gave it over the years from the thing itself, it's quite a good little book.
Grim is your typical seventeen-year-old troublemaker. Actually, he's not. He's a lot nicer than most of the other kids in the rural town of Clearwater, Idaho. A former street kid from Seattle who went through unimaginable trauma during his years on the street, Grim found his way to Clearwater while hitchhiking to Missoula (why he was going there we don't know; nor does he) and was taken in by Clara, the town's unofficial foster mother. Life goes on as it normally does for bored seventeen-year-olds during the summer until just before the Fourth of July, when a young girl is abandoned at the town's diner. When it's discovered that those who brought her had left her, the town drunk goes crazy for no apparent reason and attacks the girl. Michelle, another of the town's ennui-filled high school students, is forced to save the girl by killing the drunk. Thus begins the tentative coming-of-age dance between Grim and Michelle, and it intensifies when Clara springs the girl from the local mental hospital and takes her in. The girl, whom Clara calls Angel, is not alone, though, and what comes in her wake may spell the town's doom if Grim and his foster brother Danny can't find a way to figure out what's going on and stop it.
I'll give Brian Knight one thing—he knows how to take your expectations, turn them on their heads, and stomp them gleefully into the dirt. Expect nothing to go the way you think it will in the final twenty pages of this book, and that is a very good thing. (The downside is that I ended up having to re-read the last two chapters in order to make sense of the final few sentences, but that's a trade-off I wish I had to make far more than I actually do.) He's also relatively good at most of the technical stuff; I mentioned, in a way, the inconsistency I saw in Grim (though I get the feeling Knight meant that as a depiction of the dichotomy between the way the rest of the town saw Grim and the way his family, and Michelle, did), but the characters are well-done, the plot is slick if just a touch underdeveloped (again, this may well be by design; the monster is always scary until the special effects guy actually tries to show it. Viz. The millions who were disappointed when It revealed itself in Stephen King's novel of the same name.), and the town, while also underdeveloped, is just about perfect, in the bits we see. The whole time I was reading this novel I was fighting to keep myself from comparing it to Kealan Patrick Burke's Currency of Souls until I realized there was no way I was going to be able to stop myself. Knight's book is simply not as well-written as Burke's, but from the standpoint of using horror to explore the themes common to both, Knight is equally laudable. This one's worth reading if you're a horror fan. *** ½
Like many obsessive bookies, I have a tendency to keep lists. On one of them I jot down titles that I hear about that sound great, but that I can't yet find at Amazon. Way back in 2004, I first heard buzz about a book called Broken Angel, by a chap I'd never heard of called Brian Knight. It sounded fantastic, and it was the book with which I began keeping that particular list. Here it is five years later, and my library picked up copies. (In fact, they picked up as many copies as they do of successful midlist authors—twenty-five. Kudos to Mr. Knight.) The book has had five years to stew in the back of my head, and as usual with such things, by the time I got my hands on it, I figured it was probably the best thing since sliced bread. It's not, and if I make the attempt to divorce the lionization I gave it over the years from the thing itself, it's quite a good little book.
Grim is your typical seventeen-year-old troublemaker. Actually, he's not. He's a lot nicer than most of the other kids in the rural town of Clearwater, Idaho. A former street kid from Seattle who went through unimaginable trauma during his years on the street, Grim found his way to Clearwater while hitchhiking to Missoula (why he was going there we don't know; nor does he) and was taken in by Clara, the town's unofficial foster mother. Life goes on as it normally does for bored seventeen-year-olds during the summer until just before the Fourth of July, when a young girl is abandoned at the town's diner. When it's discovered that those who brought her had left her, the town drunk goes crazy for no apparent reason and attacks the girl. Michelle, another of the town's ennui-filled high school students, is forced to save the girl by killing the drunk. Thus begins the tentative coming-of-age dance between Grim and Michelle, and it intensifies when Clara springs the girl from the local mental hospital and takes her in. The girl, whom Clara calls Angel, is not alone, though, and what comes in her wake may spell the town's doom if Grim and his foster brother Danny can't find a way to figure out what's going on and stop it.
I'll give Brian Knight one thing—he knows how to take your expectations, turn them on their heads, and stomp them gleefully into the dirt. Expect nothing to go the way you think it will in the final twenty pages of this book, and that is a very good thing. (The downside is that I ended up having to re-read the last two chapters in order to make sense of the final few sentences, but that's a trade-off I wish I had to make far more than I actually do.) He's also relatively good at most of the technical stuff; I mentioned, in a way, the inconsistency I saw in Grim (though I get the feeling Knight meant that as a depiction of the dichotomy between the way the rest of the town saw Grim and the way his family, and Michelle, did), but the characters are well-done, the plot is slick if just a touch underdeveloped (again, this may well be by design; the monster is always scary until the special effects guy actually tries to show it. Viz. The millions who were disappointed when It revealed itself in Stephen King's novel of the same name.), and the town, while also underdeveloped, is just about perfect, in the bits we see. The whole time I was reading this novel I was fighting to keep myself from comparing it to Kealan Patrick Burke's Currency of Souls until I realized there was no way I was going to be able to stop myself. Knight's book is simply not as well-written as Burke's, but from the standpoint of using horror to explore the themes common to both, Knight is equally laudable. This one's worth reading if you're a horror fan. *** ½
Want to read
October 24, 2016This book is copy 193 of 300 copies printed and is signed by Brian Knight.
February 29, 2016
The town of Clearwater, Iowa is quiet and safe just like most typical small American towns. They don't have problems with violent crime. That is until the day a teenaged girl is found abandoned in the town cafe. She's been heavily drugged and has no memory of who she is or how she got there.
Clara has taken in unwanted children as fosters before and can't bear the thought of this poor girl being locked up in a mental hospital. Since the girl's parents can't be found and she doesn't know her own name, Clara begins to call her Angel. Angel settles in at Clara's place and befriends her new foster brother Grim, and his girlfriend. Since this is a horror story it all begins to go downhill from there.
Angel is strange. She appears normal, but something is a little bit off about her. Unrest follows her, beginning on the day when she was first noticed quietly sitting in the cafe. A string of deaths and disappearances occur and while nobody can prove that Angel is involved she begins to apologize for the trouble she is causing. We never do find out exactly what it is about Angel that is so unsettling or that causes so much violence in her wake.
Great writing, great use of suspense. Just enough gore without being over the top.
Clara has taken in unwanted children as fosters before and can't bear the thought of this poor girl being locked up in a mental hospital. Since the girl's parents can't be found and she doesn't know her own name, Clara begins to call her Angel. Angel settles in at Clara's place and befriends her new foster brother Grim, and his girlfriend. Since this is a horror story it all begins to go downhill from there.
Angel is strange. She appears normal, but something is a little bit off about her. Unrest follows her, beginning on the day when she was first noticed quietly sitting in the cafe. A string of deaths and disappearances occur and while nobody can prove that Angel is involved she begins to apologize for the trouble she is causing. We never do find out exactly what it is about Angel that is so unsettling or that causes so much violence in her wake.
Great writing, great use of suspense. Just enough gore without being over the top.
February 21, 2008
Mr. Knight weaves a spooky tale about a girl mysteriously found one summer day in the town's cafe with amnesia, after a car accident. One older childless woman who had taken in a couple of children before decides to "adopt" her, and name her Angel.
As an outsider, sheltered from prying eyes until Angel could recover and begin to remember something of her past, the story's tension builds. Mysterious things happen around town, people disappear, and there are several grisly deaths.
The novel is fast-paced, and draws in the reader to sympathize with the main characters. The ending, however, did not do justice to the rest of the book. Overall, I found it to be an enjoyable read.
As an outsider, sheltered from prying eyes until Angel could recover and begin to remember something of her past, the story's tension builds. Mysterious things happen around town, people disappear, and there are several grisly deaths.
The novel is fast-paced, and draws in the reader to sympathize with the main characters. The ending, however, did not do justice to the rest of the book. Overall, I found it to be an enjoyable read.
June 20, 2013
This is the story of Angel, but it's also the story of Grim. It read very much like a horror movie watches. There were a couple of good scenes, though, to be sure!!! I like the idea of the book. And I also like the treatment of female characters as more than objects.
January 9, 2018
Broken Angel grabbed me from the very beginning. It opens by setting up the dark and compelling mystery that pulled me through the entire book. From there flows a rich story full of realistic characters and horrific events that create a rollercoaster of tension and emotion.
Brian Knight’s writing style creates a realism that makes you want to throttle him on occasion. You want a little story book style magical good thing happening inserted in there somewhere, but he gives you only the unsettling true-to-nature responses that people have in horrific situations, the murphy’s law frustration that we all experience in real life, the dangerous close-minded attitudes produced by fear. And, of course, horror perpetuating horror.
The dark mystery of Broken Angel pulls you through this page-turner right up to the sucker punch ending. No spoilers here, just an assurance that this is a must for horror fans. It has it all: supernatural suspense, mystery, graphic horror, psychological horror. It spans the spectrum of horror subgenres.
This is a re-release, so if you missed it before, here is your second chance to be properly horrified by a very talented and twisted writer. Reminiscent of very early Stephen King stories, Broken Angel by Brian Knight belongs in your collection. It is officially shelf worthy.
Brian Knight’s writing style creates a realism that makes you want to throttle him on occasion. You want a little story book style magical good thing happening inserted in there somewhere, but he gives you only the unsettling true-to-nature responses that people have in horrific situations, the murphy’s law frustration that we all experience in real life, the dangerous close-minded attitudes produced by fear. And, of course, horror perpetuating horror.
The dark mystery of Broken Angel pulls you through this page-turner right up to the sucker punch ending. No spoilers here, just an assurance that this is a must for horror fans. It has it all: supernatural suspense, mystery, graphic horror, psychological horror. It spans the spectrum of horror subgenres.
This is a re-release, so if you missed it before, here is your second chance to be properly horrified by a very talented and twisted writer. Reminiscent of very early Stephen King stories, Broken Angel by Brian Knight belongs in your collection. It is officially shelf worthy.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews