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.

Review of House by Ted Dekker and Frank Peretti

Jack, Stephanie, Randy, and Leslie finds themselves trapped in the same house in the dead of night after having their car tires shredded on nails, some trick by local punks, or the beginning to something much worse. Now, trapped into this house together, they discover that things aren’t what they appear as the find out they are apart of some man’s twist game and if they don’t follow three simple rules, they’ll be dead before morning. In House strangers become allies, allies become enemies, and the strange and unusual doesn’t begin to cover it.

It was a thrilling read and at times I thought for sure I knew what was going on and then the authors would throw in a twist, add a character, create something, and just blow my mind! There is a lot of symbolism within this book and at times it’s was gross- I’m referring to pudding. Anyone who has read the book would know.

The authors pulled off giving the book a creepy feel and confusing the heck out of me sometimes, but by the end you are able to pull the pieces together. Whether all the characters make it out alive, or at all, you're going to have to find that out on your own.

Something I love is that if you know Ted Dekker than you kind of might know the connection of the villain to his other works, but that’s all I’ll tell you about that. I will hint that the connection can be found in his Paradise Novels.

Now, one of the things I didn't care about was the mental comments or the connections your character was making or not making at certain times. The authors pretty much spelled out what was going on or what your character was not understanding in his thoughts and I was thinking, ‘yeah, I got that!’. But asides from pointing out what I felt like was obvious things the book took several twists and turns I didn't see coming!

This book was an interesting read and even though I find myself usually not learning towards the Christian books, this one is worth a read. It’s yet another hit from the minds of Ted Dekker and Frank Peretti.

I give it a four out of five.

A couple of their works:

Ted Dekker wrote Showdown, The circle Trilogy, and Skin

http://teddekker.com

Frank Peretti wrote This Present Darkness, the Oath, and Monster

http://frankperetti.com

-Brenda Franklin, author of The pulse Trilogy, and Guardian, A Fated Pairing.