Beth’s Reviews > Chapelwood > Status Update

I think this is intended to be a slow burn, but instead often feels sluggish and boring. I'd have expected more intensity post the halfway point.

Made it past the halfway hump! Now that our cast has all gathered in the same place, I'm enjoying it a lot more. I still feel the first 150 pages or so could have been tighter, more suspenseful, less repetitive.

I'm about where I was when I got distracted and stopped reading this book about a year ago. Funny that I'd wandered away just as the MC from the previous book had her "call to adventure."

(I didn't remember Simon Wolf as a character in _Maplecroft_. Well, it has been over ten years since I read it.)

I'm not expecting the same book as the first, but so far this second book is rather slow and repetitive, and not providing enough atmosphere, suspense, monsters, etc. to compensate.

Had a failed run on this one back in May that ended at p. 150. Let's see if I can get a little further (or even finish it) this time.

I like the idea of the basement under city hall being a dark, damp abandoned site-like place where old paperwork and junked office furniture is eaten by something unknown.

(book otherwise remains only moderately interesting to read, unfortunately)

There are a couple of striking parts in these first pages, but on the whole there's far less Cthulhian creepy-crawliness than I'd like. The (soon to be ex-) City Commissioner's recent section near-entirely repeated information we've seen already in other characters'.

I read Maplecroft, the first book of this duology, as an ARC around the time it came out. I enjoyed it, but somehow in the intervening nearly ten years never got around to reading this one. As often happens with long gaps in my series reading, a sense of murky Northeastern America seaside atmosphere remains in my mind from the first book, but not much of the plot.