Book review of Monster by Frank Peretti

I give it four out of five stars

Reed and Beck Shelton are spending the weekend camping when their fun filled adventure soon turns into a nightmare. During the first night they hear an unearthly wail and it isn’t long before something emerges and begins to pursue them. In the mist of running for their lives Beck falls out of sight of Reed and the last terrifying image he is left with is his wife being carried off by a creature into the night.

With friends, and townsfolk Reed knows they don’t have much time to find Beck, but it isn’t long before he realizes something is hunting them and it too isn’t human.

This turned out to be more of an adventure mystery then a scary thriller like I was thinking it would be from the name and in the first two chapters I was scared for the characters and emotional with Reed after his wife is taken by a creature at night when they were running for their lives. It is quickly reveled that Beck is safe, for the moment, and in the care of -for lack of a better word- Bigfoot.

I think my favorite chapters would be the first couple and the end. Everything in the middle was a nice ride of mystery, searching, putting pieces of a puzzle together, and survival. It was fun, but at times I felt it was lacking a good kick of something. A great thing about the way he ended each chapter was that each seemed to have a stopping point. You could finish one chapter, walk away for a few hours, and come back later heading straight into the next chapter with a good sense as to what had happened and where you had left off. Each one ended very nicely. I did this a few times so I could go to work or fix food.

Frank Peretti also has a way of truly putting you in the shoes of the character. If you’re in the middle of the woods, you can pretty much smell the woods. If you’re getting berries shoved into your mouth, your saliva glands begin to work overtime and you start tasting them. It was a lot of fun to see what he was seeing, run if someone was running, or smell the stench coming off of Beck later in the book.

It had its shining moments. :)

-Brenda Franklin, author of the Pulse Trilogy and Guardian, A Fated Pairing.