The Children of Red Peak

By: Craig DiLouie

Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin

Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's summary

David Young, Deacon Price, and Beth Harris live with a dark secret. As children, they survived a religious group's horrific last days at the isolated mountain Red Peak. Years later, the trauma of what they experienced never feels far behind.

When a fellow survivor commits suicide, they finally reunite and share their stories. Long-repressed memories surface, defying understanding and belief. Why did their families go down such a dark road? What really happened on that final night?

The answers lie buried at Red Peak. But truth has a price, and escaping a second time may demand the ultimate sacrifice.

©2020 Craig DiLouie (P)2021 Dreamscape Media, LLC

Spellbinding

I really enjoyed this book. I am already a fan of Craig DiLouie, and this book did not disappoint. The children of Red Park brings out those emotions that draw us into the book, frustration, happiness, curiosity, and so much more. This book takes you into the mind of people who have suffered a traumatic incident in their past. and shares the different way each one of them has coped with it.

psych textbook meets Lifetime movie

If you threw a psychology textbook and a late night Lifetime movie into a blender, dropped in a few bits of a promising folk horror trope, added a vague concept that the story is a metaphor for grief/losing faith/finding faith, hit pulse for 10 hours, then layered in a few chunks of the Bible, you'll end up with this disappointing mess of a story. The kids in the cult aspect of the story was interesting and flip-flopped around on the edge of being a horror/thriller novel, but just as those events started getting good, the story switches back to the sad-sack adult survivors. Of the four main characters, we only got to "know" two of them. We just get told that one of the other two is scared of everything, along with multiple episodes in his past and present where he is, well, scared of stuff, and that his sister is a tough, bad-ass cop who looks like their mom. That's all you really get about her. There's very little action in the book until the very end. These mournful dopes are FINALLY taking steps to deal with their issues, and then... it's like the author just got bored and half-assed the resolution. The whole book just meandered around some angst and trauma and quite literally Deus Ex Machina'd an ending.

Don’t Bother

I loved DiLouie’s other book about the virus, and I love cults as a Sub-genre. That said, don’t waste your time with this one. It has good intentions but felt rushed to meet a deadline— not that the book is fast paced. It’s just not good. It’s not creepy, the characters are cliche, what it lacks in mystery it makes up for in sentimentality. I literally stopped reading with 5 minutes left because I truly couldn’t be bothered to waste one more minute of my life with this one.

unbelievable!

Even though this book is a work of fiction, unfortunately there's a bunch of stupid cults out there that think like that. the story was OK. narrator was good.

This story got weird, not good weird.

I am all for a good mystery, but this book got strange and not in a good way. I felt the story was truncated. He built up the characters but then did nothing with them. This could have been a much more complex story, and maybe that would ha e made the weird ending a little better.

An interesting take on what a cult can be

The story and concept was fascinating to me. The pacing was decent. My only complaint is about the lack of an emotional punch. Sometimes, the author really makes you feel what these characters are going through, and while other moments feel hollow. It is beautifully written and well crafted, but a few of the characters needed a bit more development.

Why is this so highly recommended?

Writing a horror/suspense book with unlikeable characters makes it hard to care about what happens to them. 80% of the book is easily skipped and what’s left is highly predictable. The ending is just kind of a shrug into an oddly happy ending. Can I have my credit back?

It was meh!

Shout out to James Patrick Cronin he did a stellar job. The book however was meh. I won’t spoil the ending, but I was hoping for more than it gave. A good lead up only to be disappointed.

Had me hooked and then nothing.

It was a sum what of enjoyable ride till you realize the at the top of the hill is nothing and you now have to get off the ride. Also your little bother ate your ice cream while on the ride. It was that level of disappointment.

How long way to absolutely nothing.

If I could only get the time back that it took to listen to this. The character building was water down and the story fantastical.