The Cursed Among Us by John Durgin

The Cursed Among Us by John Durgin
My Rating: ★★★

Howie Burke and his friends are obsessed with horror movies. There’s not much to do in the small town of Newport, but they love their horror movies, and they love their film class at their local high school. Now that they’re filming their latest mini horror movie, they’re finding themselves inching closer and closer to the woods that the town has banned everyone from entering. The Black Heart Killer who terrorized the town twenty years ago made those woods the hiding place for his victims, and the town just wants to forget all about it and those woods. One night, Howie and his friends venture deep into the woods to film and stumble upon the grave of someone. They will soon learn why the town banned everyone from entering those woods…

My best friend and I were looking for a thrilling mystery to read together when we stumbled upon this book. While this is not a thriller, we were pulled in by the paranormal aspects and overall compelling summary. It sounded like it’d be a pretty good read, so we both got a copy and dove in. We follow Howie and his small group of friends, Cory, Todd, and Ryan through each of their perspectives all book long. Each of these teenagers have their own private horror stories they carry with them, whether it’s in their personal lives, their social lives being peppered with bullies, or the curse that is about to be unleashed on them by accident. We mainly follow Howie, but we do jump around to each of his friends as well as the occasional short lived random character. Out of the group of four friends, I think we got to know Cory the least.

One of the things that I like about this book is that we spend some time getting to know the core cast before the paranormal shenanigans really get rolling. I liked the core plot, but I think we’re missing some information because I was left with a lot of questions. While I can ask the silly ones, like why fight a demon with a stapler when you’re a core member of a coven, I really just want to know what the town’s coven had been up to for the last twenty years. No one bothered to look for the grave in the forest and no one prepped for if someone were to accidentally release the demon. Even those facing the demon who knew what it took to face them did nothing but run around like chickens with their heads cut off. The whole coven aspect of the story ended up being one giant plot hole leaving me with a bunch of questions and no answers.

That said, I did like the story. Howie, Cory, Todd, and Ryan were very realistic characters. I feel bad for all of them. Howie goes home to an abusive home life, Todd is anxiety riddled, Ryan has always been a target for bullying, and Cory is just the semi-weird kid pining after Bethany. Don’t even get me started on Bethany, though. We rarely see her and her entire purpose is to be Cory’s prize if he survives accidentally rereleasing a demon on the town. As far as characterization goes, it was interesting to see the group of friends be jealous of different aspects of each other’s lives. For example, Howie is jealous of Ryan for having really sweet and loving parents while poor Ryan is just desperately trying to make friends and keep them.

Plus, the book is extremely fast paced and a surprisingly fast read. I was confused by the way time worked since it’d be night but then there was daylight before it was night again. I didn’t mind having information dumped on me, but sometimes it was done at the most random times or in strange ways. Some of the character building on characters who were about to push up daisies was done in the same way and that was kind of odd too. However, I think the author had something good going here and I think they have a lot of potential. I’m looking forward to checking out some of their future works because I think they’re someone who is going to continue to improve and eventually put out a lot of really good and solid novels sometime in the future.