The crooked boy by Moses Barraza.
A group of apparently close-knit friends venture to an abandoned hospital for a scare, but when things go wrong - terribly wrong - as soon as the night begins, the kids receive more than what they asked for, and when one of the teenagers is murdered, they put into motion a domino effect of supernatural horror, led by an evil older than humankind itself...a sleeping evil that was put to sleep for a reason. Its name: the Lord of the Flies.
An ok read. Slow but readable. 3*.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this book. Unfortunately I have been unable to get into it.

The Crooked Boy by Moses Barraza is a good old-fashioned horror scarefest which makes your palm sweat and your pulse race. The perfect Halloween read.

If you have read many of my reviews or you now me you know I love a good ghost story. And a ghost story in an asylum is on very close to the top of my list of favorites. So when I saw this book on Netgalley I had to request it.

The book started out pretty good. I just wished it had of stayed that way. I thought I as going to be reading a book that took place in a haunted asylum instead it started in the asylum then jumps to a few months later where bad things are happening to all the kids who survived their night at the asylum.

I have to say the grammar and punctuation was pretty bad in the book. I am not sure if the copy I received was the unedited version or not. Te book had a lot of flashback in that had nothing to do with the story at all and kind of left me a bit bored. The book is creepy in spots i have to give it that, the part about the sex party with teenagers could of totally been left out though.

I received this book from the Author or Publisher via Netgalley.com to read and review.

Scary as hell with plenty of action! The author is quite talented, and anything goes in this book. Those with weak stomachs need not apply. No one is safe so don't bother locking your doors. This was the perfect bedtime reading for me because I'm a huge horror fan. I love experiencing a new author. High octane fear and an adrenaline rush are what's in store when you read this.

This was a nice, late night read with just enough chills and thrills to make you keep the light on. The characters were complex and interesting and the plot was well-written and fast-paced. This definitely tapped into and fed my personal fear of being trapped in an old, abandoned hospital. The creep factor was on point!

*I received a complimentary ARC of this story collection from NetGalley and Black Rose Writing in order to read and provide a voluntary, unbiased and honest review, should I choose to do so.

Barraza delivers what the horror genre has desperately needed for many years - a story that is once fresh, yet familiar, and truly scary.

What started out as a five star read, quickly dropped to a three star read. This book suffers from detail overload. Where simple descriptions would suffice, this author unnecessarily over describes each emotion, action, etc. A book doesn't need useless information to make it a great read. It actually makes a book a two star read instead of that five star, that you were hoping for. I cannot recommend this book.

The premise of the book wasn't bad, and it started out promising and then the grammatical and repetitive descriptor sh** show started. Either English wasn't the first language, it was translated by someone for whom English wasn't the first language, or it was the very first book written and was completely unedited; it was pretty awful. 30 overly used adjectives would be jammed into one paragraph where they didn't even make sense based on the context. For every $1 word that could have been used to describe something, a $50 thesaurus word would be used that didn't actually fit where it was used.

I can't even rate the plot or describe it because the entire book was written this way. Relevant was swapped in for relative, an entire 7 (SEVEN) Kindle pages were given to describing how two summer kids weren't worried about the various illnesses they'd encounter as adults, and the sentences would change tense right in the middle of them.

That's all. It's all I've got for this one. I've given 3 days to try to slog through this book and I can't anymore. I hope the next book, if there is one, is more polished. Good luck. I'd suggest a great editor.

This story had all the promise of a good horror but I wasn't keen on the style of writing.
It was creepy and gory with some good descriptions and an interesting storyline but I never really warmed to the main people or found myself caring much about what happened to them.
Would have liked to have seen a bit more fleshing out of characters before it all started as sometimes I was left wondering what was going on.

A group of kids head to an abandoned institution to film any activity. They get more than what they bargained for. One ends of dead and they proceed to unleash pure evil. I found this book to be good. In the beginning I was a little lost as to what was going on, but it all comes together at the end of the book. Some scary moments and some seasoned language, but that will not stop me from recommending this book. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for my honest review.

The Crooked Boy by Moses Barraza was received direct from the publisher. I had never heard of this novel or author before and later I saw it was written by a high school senior, just for your information In modern writing, this is often a good thing, to seek out and read fresh authors. The basic plotline is your typical dark and stormy night, teenagers, an abandoned facility and supernatural shenanigans are certain to occur. Overall a good first novel and if you or someone you but gifts for likes what I described, give this book a read.

3 stars

I knew the day would come when I would finally be able to say that I did not finish a book. I am usually quite determined to finish a book I start, and I made it 68% of the way through this one, so I feel like I read enough of it to write a review, but I could not finish it.

The Crooked Boy is supposed to be a horror genre book about a group of teenagers that enter an abandoned insane asylum to go ghost hunting. One of the boys is murdered by a dark entity living in the asylum. Months later, the entity starts terrorizing the remaining group, for reasons unknown. The Good Reads synopsis reads as follows:

A group of apparently close-knit friends venture to an abandoned hospital for a scare, but when things go wrong - terribly wrong - as soon as the night begins, the kids receive more than what they asked for, and when one of the teenagers is murdered, they put into motion a domino effect of supernatural horror, led by an evil older than humankind itself...a sleeping evil that was put to sleep for a reason. Its name: the Lord of the Flies.

From the synopsis, I was to assume that the entire story would take place within the insane asylum. I imagined a horror movie type setting where the kids try to survive with flashlights and cameras inside the walls of the abandoned building. What I got was a confusing, jumbled story taking place several months later.

The story begins with the group of teenagers (Charlie, Chloe, Josh, and Matt) being driven to the asylum by one of the group's older brother (Chloe's brother Gilbert). He is speeding in dangerous weather and winds up hitting another car and killing the driver. The brother flees the scene because he doesn't have insurance (what? really?) and leaves the group of teenagers behind. Chloe, Matt, and Josh leave Charlie behind at the scene to make a run for the asylum.

Two police officers show up and begin to arrest Charlie when a flock of crows (yes, crows) begins to attack them. Charlie gets away, only to be chased down by a huge, black wolf. He makes it in to the asylum, with his friends, and they decided to find a windowless room to try to sleep in to take shelter from the cold. Charlie awakes from a terrifying nightmare and hears a door slam somewhere in the building. He decides to investigate and begins pulling wallpaper off the walls in the room with the slammed door, and finds writing written in blood.

He gets the bright idea to use the Ouija board with his friends inside the room after hearing a boy's voice. After their Ouija conversation is cut short, terrifying things begin to happen, ending with Charlie's death. Months later, after Charlie's body disappears, and a court date for the death of the missing driver and car (yes, both bodies, and the mangled car magically disappeared), it is determined that the responding officers did not recall meeting the kids or showing up to the scene, and that the teenagers were to be placed under house arrest and required therapy.

It is when the house arrest sentence is up that the entity tries to kill Chloe, forging a suicide note in her hand. The entity also pays a visit to one of the officers, Robby Wildrow. Officer Wildrow happens to be the attending officer to Chloe's case, so, naturally, they figure out that they have something in common, and decide to start investigating the asylum together.

They figure out that there was a fire in the building back in 1985 that each newspaper had a different story about. The remaining staff that made it out of the fire have all died at this point from unusual deaths, and the relative of one of those staff members targets the pair, steals the photographs that they have acquired during research, and kidnaps Chloe. When Robby goes to save her, somehow the house blows up, and Chloe ends up in a coma.

It is here that the story switches points of view to Matt. It is also here that I had finally had enough of the story and decided to stop reading. Here are my reasons for deciding to not finish the book:

The story started taking unusual, nonsensical twists from the beginning. The entity only seemed interested in Charlie until his death, and then, suddenly, after months of no activity, it decides to terrorize Chloe, and only after she is put in to a coma does it decide to go after another character. The history of the asylum did not explain what the entity was or where it came from, and the occurrences in the asylum during 1985 were outrageous and unbelievable and were supposedly never reported as they were happening. The story digressed too many times, and for too long each time, with character flashbacks that didn't quite fit, one flashback lasted several pages and never made it's point of comparison to a current character as promised. The flashbacks were often hard to differentiate from the main story too. And, finally, the last straw was the flashback Matt has while standing in the middle of a sewer tunnel, setting off cherry bombs with his new friends, involving a wild, drunken, public sex act at a party full of 16 year old kids.

Kudos to you if you have made it this far in to the review. I really wanted to enjoy this book. I kept reading because there were a few things that made me want to know more. At one point, we find out that the father of the boy that was murdered at the beginning, Charlie, was a patient in 1985. The fact that each newspaper from that year had a different story about the fire that closed down the building was intriguing, and the imagery used with some of the gory details was horrific enough. Those few points kept me reading until the confusing shift to Matt and his unnecessary, disgusting flashback. By then the negatives had stacked up so high that that scene finally topped the list for me, so I would definitely not recommend this book and I will not be finishing it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Black Rose Publishing for providing me with this free e-copy for my honest opinion.

A group of teens are heading to an abandoned institution ready to film any strange happenings. On the way they are in a car accident which they don't want to report, accosted by police, and attacked by birds, all before they get to their destination. Inside they discover a room where someone has left a dire message scrawled across the walls in blood "He is coming he is here we can't escape even death can not free us God is dead"

I have some mixed feelings on this one. It has a fast pace and large volume of downright scary scenes. It's a good story that could have been great if it didn't some times take a stumble through a strange turn of phrase or odd choice of word which made it somewhat difficult to follow. There were parts that evoked chills, for example "Crows and crows and crows. Thousands of them swarmed her like flies. She swatted at the group of winged beasts, to no avail. She felt razors cut through her, sheering her skin like rice paper. She couldn't escape. There was no left or right in the tornado of demon birds. There was only black and red. Feathers and blood, feathers and blood."
Yet there were also parts that left me scratching my head. "She laughed a smile" for example.

Worth a read but I think it could benefit from a little cleaning up

A really good read. I found it hard to put down. Great story line to keep me interested and really good characters.