I loved the 50% of the book. It has a very AHS: Asylum feel to it. The characters were well created and I was so drawn to the asylum aspect for something different.
By the time I got to 62%, not only was I completely lost but I lost interest. I actually skipped to the last few pages because I couldn’t read anymore. It was slow and confusing.
Thank you for my free ARC.

"Not all of the voices we hear are imaginary."

I'm a big fan of FTP titles and was thrilled to receive an eARC of Brian Kirk's We Are Monsters for review consideration. Great cover, great blurb, I eagerly dove in.

We Are Monsters is a piercing, terrifying journey through madness, time, and redemption. From the first page, Kirk creates a world where what we know can't be trusted: memories, time, even our own eyes deceive us. Alex, an ambitious doctor determined to find a cure for schizophrenia, is on the verge of change. His secret trials aren't going well. He's broke, out of investors, and his idolized older brother's fall from star athlete to paranoid schizophrenia leaves him constantly in the shadow of his father's affections. Conversely, his mentor is set to hand over control of Sugar Hill institution to Alex.

As long as the review board meeting goes well.

Of course, things don't go as planned. Under the encouragement of his wife, Alex administers his unapproved serum to his brother, which ultimately has disastrous consequences and serves as a catalyst for a series of events which force the reader to endure a frightening, introspective unraveling of reality. Characters relive their pasts, their worst fears in brutal, bloody detail. The line between crazy and sane bends and blurs.

And at the forefront is one pervasive question: What if we're all crazy?

I loved so many things about this book. The quiet, philosophical moments Kirk explores the nature, stigmas, and treatment of mental illness in modern society are beautiful. Nightmarish imagery 10/10--his descriptions are vivid and visceral and cinematic. And while I didn't particularly like any of the characters--I'm not sure you're supposed to, in fact--I felt for them. They were complex and flawed, smart and forgiving.

An interesting read (with a few dense sections that could've been pared down for a crisper experience). Brian Kirk has breathed life into a horrifying interpretation on the asylum genre. If you like your MCs with a healthy dose of reality and an extra scoop of alternate reality, this is the book for you.

Very well written love this type.of book will be buying the hard copy for my library. Very good plot as well as very good page turner. Hope to read more from the author in the future. Will definitely be looking for others and adding this Author to my favorites list.

I really didn't get this book and it could be that I totally missed the mark and was hoping for something that this story wasn't. I was kind of hoping for some sort of demonic type exorcism story. I didn't really like the writing or really anything in this book. I think I went into it with the wrong expectations so when they weren't met I was disappointed.

I loved the whole story but unfortunately I personally thought the book dragged in a few places. Very good writing and interesting storyline but it just wasn’t for me. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read it.

We are Monsters is an interestingly well written book which tends to be quite intellectually focussed to a specific horror/science fiction audience. Using science, psychiatry and a lovecraftian type theme to propel the story forward, in a tone that may leave some audience a bit cold but will have its significant fans that will champion the novel.

Kirk is an intelligent author who never writes down to his audience. Using scientific tense and ensuring that each character has a full back story tends to bog down the story for the people who like quick fast horror. Kirk lets his story slowly build adding multiple layers to his story through transitional passages until getting into the meat of the story. If you are a fan of this type of story, there is much to treasure. I am somewhat in the middle. I like this part of the story and enjoyed the slow build.

The middle of the story, we have the characters moving the plot forward and this I enjoyed the best. I liked how the first part of the story breaks away for the second part. You could really see the story coming together and my interest was surely piqued to see where this may go. The emotional weight of the characters really pays off from the slow burn of the beginning.

The final part of the story, left me a bit cold. This maybe more down to my personal taste of Lovecraftian/Freudian expositions although I did appreciate the merit of this section, still I wasn’t as invested as I was in the first two thirds of the novel.

The characters are very strong and well balanced. I mostly liked Eli but the other characters left me a bit cold. I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to be rooting for the main character. I didn’t really like the Alex character too much although he does work in the confines of the story. He was like a Frankenstein character and if this is the case here, there are similarities, then works exceedingly well. If we supposed to be on his side, then the book kind of fails on this front. This will be a personal decision based on each reader’s experience.

This is a slow burn and there is tremendous amount of work that was put into this and I appreciated. I enjoyed the slow burn because it did keep my interest piqued but as stated above, a little let down through my own personal tastes of the last third. The author writes very well and their fluid aspects to his credit.

Overall, this is very well written and extremely interesting. I really liked the slow burn of the story and although the last third did not live up to my own personal taste, I did admire the way it was written and really like the character personalities. Although I do think this will not be for all tastes but for those who like their horror/science fiction set in a realistic setting with an intellectual thread to feed the brain, they can not go wrong with Kirk’s novel.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC of this book. I really liked this book. Lots of suspense, great story line, kept me on edge. Another great one by this author.

I'm going to do something that I seldom do, and that is to give a review with No reminders!
My thanks, as always to Flame Tree Press, Netgalley and the Author.
I actually didn't give much of a shit for this story. It's not that it was awful, it just wasn't that great. I did enjoy the character building. It helped a great deal in my understanding.
My son, Dakota is a paranoid schizophrenic. Some people have been stupid enough to tell me that he's not that...he's actually bi-polar. No. Unless you've been there and seen both, then you don't know. Maybe that is where the cohesiveness of this tale fell apart for me. I'd love to see something like this work. I've always thought that if someone put the time and energy into finding and sharing a cure...not a fucking pill, but a cure. Like they do with cancer and such, then maybe, one day, there may be a cure. Until then? Nobody is getting better.
Good story. Great story? Naw! It was strange. I love strange, but this wasn't my kind of odd.

I have to say that this book definitely didn't go in the direction that I was expecting it to but it wasn't bad. For me, it was just a kind of average book. However, that may be because I wasn't expecting something that was more more fantastical as oppose to a slasher story.
It was definitely a slow burn kind of book. We get well into the second half of the book before any of the 'main' action starts. Prior to this there had been a lot about the characters' backgrounds, hospital politics etc and I just felt that those parts were over written and quite long compared to the parts where we saw the 'unforseen side effects' the synopsis promised us were horrifying. And for me this felt like too long of a wait and made the book a slow read.
There was a good underlying message regarding how we define reality and how we define mental illness (or who defines these things), and also a great reminder that people with severe mental illness are still people and should be treated with compassion.
Overall, I didn't hate the book but I didn't love it either so it's a solid 3 stars for me.

It's a well written book but I found it too slow at times and the book fell flat.
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

We Are Monsters is a good thriller, but it is a bit slow in parts. The characters are interesting and the premise is fascinating.

A mind bending excursion into psychosis ... this is a re-release of Brian Kirk's brilliant debut novel ... first published in 2015 to high acclaim and nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel.
Enter the confined world of the Sugar Hill mental asylum where a power struggle is evolving. Treatment methods are at odds and being disparaged by the lay board of the hospital. They are in the midst of dumping Dr Eli Alpert, the Chief Medical Director, who exposes a compassionate and humanistic approach to treatment, rather than over utilization of a polypharmacy approach. However, his protege Dr Alex Drexler is secretly working on a drug that will "cure" mental illness and return the patient to his premorbid self. With the aid of Board Director Bearman he is offcampus conducting a trial in unexpecting test subjects. His results have been less than successful ... with many subjects convinced they ventured beyond the veil of our material world and viewed what lies beyond. Alex was injecting a derivative of the neurotransmitter Dimethyltryptamine through the orbit into the pineal gland. A form of this compound is endogenous to the brain. He hypothesized that people with mental illness who experienced hallucinations and distorted perception of reality were suffering from an unregulated release of neurochemicals. His compound was designed to restore balance to the levels released by the pineal gland and thus restore the patient back to a "normal" baseline.
A rare opportunity arrives with the appearance of the asylums newest and most infamous patient, the notorous Crosby Nelson, given the appelation, "The Apocalypse Killer" As Dr Alpert falls into disfavor with the hospital board, Alex is suddenly thrust into a position of immediate ascension if he can prove his formula works by testing it on Crosby.
However this imprudent and premature venture turns into a living nightmare for all the occupants of the Sugar Hill asylum, as reality shifts on it's axis. Kirk expertly weaves a harrowing tableau , right out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. He mercilessly ratchets up the cinematic horror to almost unbearable limits, only to burst into an unimaginable but satisfying denouement. Along the way, Kirk provides pitch perfect pacing and characterizations. Kirk provides an insightful look into mental illness and how society responds ... and provides this interesting description: " Some days the world was a roiling stew of insanity, a cacophony of discordant voices, of contrasting ideas, of irrational impulses, of impossible images"
Thanks to NetGalley and Flame Tree Press for providing an Uncorrected Proof of this gem in exchange for an honest review. (Please check out ReadersRemains.com)

“We’re sick. We’re all sick. But we can be cured. And we can be kind. We don’t have to let our lives be ruled by the shadows of our past.”

We Are Monsters. This is the debut novel for Brian Kirk. As far as debuts go, this one is very impressive. Kirk is a gifted writer and it shows in his details. The characters in this book have gone through tragic beginnings that lead them in, one way or another, to Sugar Hill Mental Asylum. Some come as patients, others work there in one capacity or another.

Dr. Alex Drexler is in line to become the Chief Medical Director at Sugar Hill, a position currently held by his mentor, Dr. Eli Alpert. Alex has developed a ground-breaking new drug that could cure schizophrenia. He’s ready to claim his new status. He’s invested in his future, in his intelligence, and in himself. After a failed trial run of the drug, all of his hopes and dreams, all of his hedged bets, teeter on the precipice of total collapse. Desperate to keep what he thinks he deserves, Alex tweaks his new drug and tries it on his favorite patient, his brother, Jerry. The results are amazing. Jerry is cured. Or is he?

What Alex discovers is that his new drug may do more than cure the mind, it just might expand it.

Kirk does a fantastic job in creating a fully developed cast of characters. Dr. Alpert’s (my favorite character in the book) history is beautifully, if not heartbreakingly, scripted through various flashback chapters. If you’re familiar with my reviews, you know that chapters of “look backs” are not one of my favorite things to find in a novel, but in capable hands, I can be persuaded to follow along. Kirk handles the majority of these with precision and flare, particularly with Dr. Alpert. From Dr. Alpert’s Vietnam experience, to the young female patient he befriends early on in his career, to the woman he would fall in love with only to watch fade away, Eli's story is the true heart of We Are Monsters.

One fair warning, mid-way through the novel, all hell breaks loose. When this shift first happened, I was so confused. I was totally lost. I struggled to wrap my head around just what in the hell was suddenly going on. Hold on. This is intentional. Kirk wants us shaken, stirred, and off kilter. It puts us in the same boat as his characters. We are dropped into this mad world to figure out whether the doctors are just as broken as the patients or if something more sinister, something more fantastic is occurring.

While the search for answers did stretch on a bit too much for me, the ending is beautifully played.

“But you don’t have to carry it with you. You can let it go.”

While We Are Monsters offers plenty of nasty descriptions in some horrifying scenes, and offers up plenty of scares (mostly in the second half of the novel), it is the heart and the tragedy of the cast that push and pull this psychological horror novel to its potential. Brian Kirk delivers a smart and gritty novel that shows us that monsters do indeed exist. We all have a darkness inside, it’s how we choose to hold that darkness that either becomes our downfall or redeems us as individuals.

I give We Are Monsters 4 stars.

I got through ten chapters and had to stop reading -- although it is an interesting concept, it was a slow moving story that was a tad frustrating because it seemed to go around in circles, dragging on and on about the main character and how things are going in his life. There wasn't a character I really enjoyed reading about or following. I may attempt to skim through to get to the other parts the other readers have noted, but have not enjoyed it.

I couldn't seem to get into this book. Though it has interesting ideas it wasn't a book for me. Was not able to finish.

After the first few chapters of this book I was not a fan, to say the least. Maybe I wouldn't even have continued reading if it wasn't for the fact that I think if people give you a book for free to get a review, you have to do them the courtesy of giving it a fair chance. I'm glad I kept reading, because I would have missed out on a great psychological thriller.

My first issue was the writing style. Some of the imagery felt a bit too constructed and forced. It felt like the writer was trying to avoid cliche imagery so much, that he exaggerated in the opposite direction. This style continued throughout the book, but I got used to it and by the end of the book it disturbed me only occasionally.

The second issue was the characters. In the first chapters, introducing the three main characters, I had a hard time relating to any of them.
Dr. Alex Drexler seemed to be extremely self-absorbed, materialist and opportunist, and totally lacking two qualities that I would think are quite crucial for someone working as a doctor in a psychiatric institution: ethics and empathy.
Dr. Eli Alpert at first appeared to be cast just to be the opposite to Alex. Idealistic, very empathic and respectful towards his patients, opposed to drugs that merely dull the patient's symptoms and minds, advocate for a more humane treatment, but maybe a bit out of touch with reality.
Angela appears to be the middle ground when we first meet her in her professional role. She treats her patients well, appears to be empathic but also seems to have a healthy dose of realism. I thought she would be the one I could relate to, until we saw her free time 'alter ego' and her self-destructive way of letting go.
Flashbacks during the first half of the book help to give more nuance to these first impressions, but it took me a long time to start to feel some sympathy for either of them.

What I did immediately like was the foreshadowing of the horror that was to come, with a little incident in the first chapter and other events later with increasing gravity. What finally came was horror on a lot of different levels, just the way I like it.
First of all it was the horror of the idea, the concept. A drug that externalizes the 'demons' that drive violent schizophrenics to their aggressive acts, and confronts others with them as well, is a scary thought, as is living through a nightmarish version of traumatic moments of your past in order to confront your own inner demons.
Second was the imagery. Take a mental hospital, give it the typical way a dream has of being recognizable but not accurate and ever changing, fill it with ghosts that are more real than they should be, and have everything that happens to your main characters have actual consequences, so they are far from invulnerable...
I admit I had a few nights of restless sleep and bad dreams after reading these scenes...

The part I liked most was the part where each character has their own dream/hallucination and is confronted with their own issues. It is the part where I realized there was a purpose to the way the characters were built, especially in the case of Angela. It made me think about how it is not always accurate to judge someone purely based on their actions and how they appear, how it is very possible that things happened in a persons past that could make you understand them better if you knew them.

That last aspect is the main reason this book earns its fourth star for me. It is not simply a horror story. It is also a book that makes you think about mental illness, about the way it is treated in our current society, and about what that means to people who suffer from various forms and degrees of mental illness.

It was dark and interesting to begin with, as we see Dr Drexler attempt a variety of experiments which all fail. This built up well a foreboding sense that something is going to go extremely wrong at Sugar Hill – especially when it is suggested to Dr Drexler to experiment on the asylum’s most notorious, dangerous, and violent patient.

Of course, this experiment does go wrong and, as a side effect, causes multiple characters to hallucinate. I really liked these sections, as I had no idea what was real and what was fake – the narration was delightfully unreliable. There were also some scary and gory scenes, which felt appropriate for the genre.

However, there are some elements on We Are Monsters which, for me, let it down.

Firstly, Dr Alex Drexler is not a mad scientist or doctor – he’s not even slightly psychotic or twisted. This was disappointing, particularly as the book is meant to be primarily a work of horror fiction. Alex only ever seems interested in his experiments in order to financially benefit from them, which made him seem much more like a businessman than a doctor. Personally, I think it could have been an interesting parallel if the doctor working so hard to cure his mentally unstable patients was as equally mentally unstable himself.

Secondly, the book does not solely focus on Dr Alex Drexler, but delves into other the backgrounds and characters of other staff members at the asylum, such as Dr Eli Alpert and Angela. Unfortunately I didn’t enjoy their storylines very much, as I was only really interested in Alex’s character, and I didn’t think they were as relevant to the overall plot.

Finally, the latter half of We Are Monsters gets very confusing, very quickly. The patients kept talking about the shadows and the monsters within, but these things weren’t explained particularly clearly. By the time I finished the book, I still didn’t understand what had happened, and I thought the ending merely added to the confusion.

To sum up, although I was interested in the premise, and some good ideas were displayed throughout, I think the execution of these ideas, for me, let We Are Monsters down.

Struggled with this one so have skipped a formal review. It had some great ideas but the execution just didn't work for me. Unfair to review a book I wasn't able to finish.

This was an okay book. I plan to read more by this author. This book is well written and the characters are described well. I like how it has mental health representation in it.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. Thank you NetGalley.

I'm a huge fan of books that take place in asylums... and man.. this book is deep. It hit so many dark areas. I was hooked from the first chapter.

I will absolutely be reading other books by Brian Kirk!