I ended up putting this one down because of the gruesome nature of the story. It's a clever idea, but ultimately too violent and too gory for me. I think it's important that this is only recommended for mature teens. It could give the young ones nightmares.

I did my best to read this book fully, and I tried three times until I put it to its final rest. I normally love sci-fi, but this book was something entirely different. The premise of aliens and rural setting was what drew me to this book, but it ultimately lost me with conspiracy theories and media meddling. I'm sure I might have enjoyed this book if I was younger, but for some reason I could not get into this story...at all.

Twisted Sci-Fi!
Bent Heavens by Daniel Kraus tells the tragic story of Liv, her father Lee, and her lifelong friend Doug. I immediately feel sorry for Liv and her father because I can predict the judgmental treatment that will probably happen after his episode of incoherent talking and nakedness in front of the community. Liv and Doug are friends and continue to maintain the traps and protection her father set after he said he was harmed by aliens a few years ago. Lee took Liv and Doug on a hunting trip and he ran away towards something that the other two couldn’t see. Liv is friends with a popular group and Doug is more of a loner that doesn’t fit in. Doug believes Lee, Liv’s father, about the aliens but Liv doesn’t. Her mother doesn’t either and they think he’s just mentally unhealthy. One day, as Liv is checking one of the traps her dad created, she finds an alien caught in one. This blows Liv’s mind. Doug and Liv keep the alien, or skinner as Lee called them, imprisoned in her backyard shed and interrogate it for any information about Lee. The skinner eventually speaks three words: car, bow, hole. Doug believes torture is the best way to get information about Lee from the skinner; Liv disagrees. This disagreement builds a rift between them and they go their separate ways. Liv realizes that car, bow, hole might mean the name Carbajal. She does some searching and meets a mysterious, dilapidated man with that name. He gives her frightening information. Several twists and tragedy build and end the science fiction story, 4 stars!

This was so strange...I think I liked it....quite a bit. Admittedly you certainly have to be in the right mindset or open to the genre....or something to appreciate the twisty, craziness that is this plot. You also have to be willing to accept some pretty crazy, out there things that are probably not factually accurate. But it certainly kept me on my toes.

I could have done without the more graphic description of Liv and Bruno's encounter, but this story was amazing. The themes of humanity were well done and the resolution was deliciously horrifying...which is what I have come to expect from Kraus. I will likely purchase multiple copies of this title and plan to nominate it for the 2023 Evergreens.

This was a very enjoyable read and I want to thank netgalley for letting me read and review this one.

For so long, I’ve been on the lookout for a YA horror that truly terrifies me, and I think I’ve found it. That’s not to say author Daniel Kraus doesn’t make a few plays toward YA traditions in Bent Heavens, but after reading it, I certainly feel as though I’ve been through a hellish, insanity-inducing nightmare and barely made it back with my mind intact.

Our story stars Liv Fleming, whose father Lee went missing more than two years ago, shortly after he started becoming mentally unstable and claiming that he had been a victim of alien abduction. The resulting paranoia had led Lee to take his daughter and her childhood friend Doug out into the woods to set traps for the aliens, which never ended up snaring anything more interesting than the odd squirrel. Still, even with her dad gone now, Liv continues to go out with Doug to the woods each day to check on the traps, partly out of tradition and partly out of hope. Even though what Lee had claimed about his abduction seemed impossible, neither do the teens want to believe that the man, whom they had both loved and respected, had been completely out of his head.

But then one day, just when Liv was about to give up hope and take down the traps once and for all, she and Doug find a strange, monstrous-looking creature caught in one of them. With shock and horror, they realize Lee had been right, which now puts his disappearance in a whole new light. Desperate to find out what had become to her father, Liv reluctantly goes along with Doug’s plan to keep the alien a secret while they figure out how to communicate with it and force it reveal Lee’s whereabouts.

Much of this occurs in the first half of the book, where the content remains quite tame. It’s what happens later on—as the story descends into dark, uncomfortable and disturbing territory—that makes Bent Heavens such a chilling, skin-crawling read. The beauty in it, too, is that there is not just a single dimension to this terror. It’s difficult to describe without giving away too much of the plot, but I will say the reason why I thought this novel was so effective is because of the combination of graphic detail and an atmosphere of unease. Kraus doesn’t pull any punches, and many of the ideas in here are meant to make you squirm, or like you’ve just taken a sucker punch to the gut. One-part body horror, one-part psychological thriller, this novel is designed to explore the darkness of human nature and the lengths we go to justify certain choices.

Bent Heavens is a “mature” YA horror in that sense, one I would hesitate to recommend to everyone, let alone every teen, because there are moments that get too “real” for comfort despite the story’s speculative fiction undertones. So be aware, this book is not for the faint of heart, and if you do not want to read about themes related to pain, cruelty and torture, I would stay far away.

Personally speaking, though, the darkness was what I loved about this book, the bold way it was written, knowing the complex emotions it would stir up and not caring. In fact, in some ways I wish this had been a purely adult novel, so we could have dispensed with certain YA conventions such as the exaggerated, high-school-style affectations in the dialogue or over-embellished prose. Liv herself is pumped full of adolescent angst, and she’s also involved in a lot of petty school-related drama that ultimately served little purpose. Furthermore, there was a pitiful attempt to shoehorn in a romance when the story really didn’t need one. Bruno’s presence seemed entirely unnecessary, and by the end of the book you realize he was just there as a tool to further plot development. Worse was how underdeveloped his character was, and rarely do Liv’s thoughts of him go beyond ogling his good looks. There’s meaningful diversity and then there’s token representation, and unfortunately, Bruno’s shallow portrayal makes it feel like the latter.

That said, the overall storyline was solid and tightly paced, even with the aforementioned diversions and the needless hanky-panky with Bruno, because in the greater scheme of things, any flaws were just minor distractions. On the whole, Kraus did a phenomenal job tracing Liv’s evolution of thought, which serves as a reflection on the darker side of human psychology. Because of this, none of the main characters are going to feel all that sympathetic, but likely this is by design. And finally, there’s the ending, which admittedly had a twist that I saw coming, yet it was still so nauseatingly and viscerally awful and devastating that I think the intended emotional impact was still felt.

So yes, Bent Heavens is a book that will stay with me for a long time. I would recommend it—but with caveats. You’ll probably need to be in a certain frame of mind to read and appreciate it, but if a truly unsettling horror is what you’re looking for and the novel’s description piques your interest, I would give it a try.

Well, this is something I probably wouldn’t have looked at if I didn’t get the email from the publisher. It’s being marketed as YA and I’m not sure how because it’s quite graphic.

I liked Liv. She’s struggling with grief and doesn’t quite know how to deal with it, so she’s lashing out and pretty much being a dick. Her relationship with Doug is interesting and I feel like a lot of that is what kept me reading. There are a few other characters, but this story is 100% focused on Liv.

Plot wise, it was okay. I thrive on dialogue and most of this story is inner monologue and sort-of-flashbacks. I spent a good portion of the story wondering how much of Lee’s story was going to be true and once something was caught, I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. As I said above, it’s really graphic. There’s loads of violence and blood and I was feeling really bad for the thing they caught.

Overall, it was a fairly dry read, but the last 25% of the book was amazing, very shocking, and raised my rating from 3 to 4 stars.

**Huge thanks to Henry Holt BFYR for the invite to read**

My Review- Thank you Henry Holt Books For Young Readers for gifting me an E-ARC of this book in exchange of an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I rate this book 3.5 out of 5 Stars. It is out today to buy at your favorite retailers!

I was so excited to see something new and fresh in the YA world! I love Alien stories, and I really enjoyed this one. Don’t let the fact that this is YA fool you though. It is pretty damn intense, and dark. I am not an avid horror reader, but this was the perfect book to open my eyes to the genre.

Parts of this book do get pretty gruesome, there is some body mangling/gore so if you are weak stomached or triggered but such things, proceed with caution. For me, the writing was dark and delish, and it had me sitting on the edge of my seat, with my heart racing, and the urge to look over my shoulder. Not to mention the Alien Abduction dreams that this book induced!

I haven’t read any other books by Daniel Kraus, but I am ready for more!

Okay, first let's get to the nitty gritty of it all, this is in no way a book that's light and fluffy. There is definitely a good chunk of gore in here, along with torture, mutilation, sexual scene and talk, and much more. But, if you know Daniel Kraus' work, then you are probably not surprised by any of it. For those that don't, I get why there's a bit of a disconnect with this novel, since it's categorized as a young adult novel. In that sense, I completely agree, would rather have seen this as adult fiction.

My other issue with this, aside from the placement in genre, was the (partial) portrayal of Liv. I get it, it's more dominant in general fiction books, but again as a ya novel, it doesn't seem to fit here. But more to the point, why is the girl (in many novels) seen as the sexual fiend, getting the man to do something they supposedly don't want. It's only an instance, but enough to have me saying no... come on, it was not needed, or doing justice to her character, at all.

Leaving some of that behind, I very much enjoyed this novel. There was a great story here. The loss of a loved one, the damage it can create to those surrounding it all, the devastation of a fractured mind, and the volatile nature that may come from many of those close to the madness. It became all of that and more as the story progressed. But yes, it might be a little of a slow burn. Just know, it does become a lot more.

For me though, Doug's character was the one in here with so much depth. He wasn't necessarily the favorite, because he does some really messed up things in here, but there's a history of his life that makes sense for all that he's become. It's a definite tragic and saddening thing to see. Then, we are given the difficult truth of what war (even if its only a war between oneself and one "enemy") can make a person believe is justifiable, when it comes to the actions taken.

Then, the ending. Even though I figured out parts, it was still a good way to close out this book. There wasn't as much sciency goodness I was hoping for, or a lot of that horror aspect to it, but there was enough to make this definitely worth the read, and time. Especially, after you get to know Dr. Faddon, oooh the chills. Those pages with him in it, were absolutely daunting. And the most emotional scenes are in that last chapter, when the fireworks really go off. Heartbreaking for days.

***I received this eARC from Macmillan Children's Publishing Group, in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.***

Liv Fleming's father is gone. He disappeared one day, for the second time, but this time he didn't come back. Was Lee Fleming right? Did aliens truly abduct him to conduct brutal experiments? Or did he just go crazy? One thing was clear, he was very unwell. Liv has done her best to move on: she has new friends and participates in new activities, but her past refuses to let her go. Her mom is an alcoholic trying to hold down two jobs and her old childhood friend, Doug, will not let her father go. He dutifully follows his instruction, confounding as they are. Every week Doug and Liv check the traps Lee built to keep them safe from the beings he swore took him.

Liv can't find it in her to cut Doug off, to tell him she won't play along anymore. But right when she feels herself about to break free, she finds something in one of Lee's traps...something that looks startlingly extraterrestrial. What happens next, what she and Doug do and what Liv discovers, is so horrific and heart-breaking. This book comes to its horror designation honestly.

Doug becomes enamored with the "enhanced interrogation techniques" from the Bush era and makes it his mission to go through each technique with the creature. At first, it was to glean information out of the creature about what happened to Lee Fleming and why the creature has Lee's special compass. But that flimsy excuse goes out the window fast, and it soon becomes solely about the torture. It was brutal and sometimes hard to read. But just in time, Liv decides to dig a little deeper and break out of Doug's rageful gravity. But what she discovers only compounds the horror of her and Doug's actions.

I think it's important to mention that the afterword of Bent Heavens is a note from Daniel Kraus concerning the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, which makes the purpose of everything I had read painfully clear. This book is a statement against torture. Humans have a lot of evil potential inside of us, and it doesn't take much to let that flourish. But we also have a lot of good, powerful enough to conquer that evil.

I can't say Bent Heavens ends happily, but it ends in a satisfying way. This book feels a lot like The X-Files in many ways: the "something strange in a small town" vibe and the science fiction twist, but most importantly, the conspiracy aspect. The reminder that a healthy distrust of our government and of authority is critical. It's a poke in the side to remind us that the truth is out there, and we need to be brave enough to shine a harsh and unforgiving light on it. That is the only way to let the good in to conquer the evil.

In addition to the intense plot and excellent twists that Kraus works in throughout Bent Heavens, the writing itself is really great. You get swept up in it and carried through all manner of horrors and action. Kraus also captures the sensations and experiences of grief wonderfully. Liv struggles through the entire book with the grief of losing her dad in such a public way and without much closure. It colors everything she does, every decision she makes. Putting her actions up against her friend Doug's (who also viewed Lee as a father) is a wonderful way to compare what grief can do to individuals.

Bent Heavens is a bit of a roller coaster and will surely have readers divided, but despite struggling through a chunk of the book I found that it was worth it.

Bent Heavens is a strangely weird, macabre science fiction story. I'm still not sure how I feel about it.

Liv's father, Lee, has been missing for a couple of years after he claimed to have been abducted by aliens and returned. The reader is taken back to find out what happened after the abduction and before he disappeared.

Lee became obsessed with protecting his loved ones from aliens. He spent all his time in the shed on the back of the property making elaborate traps to catch them and weapons to defend against them. Liv and a good friend, Doug, were in on Lee's plans. Ever since Lee has disappeared, Liv and Doug go out to the woods behind her house to check the traps every Sunday. Liv just believes her father was mentally ill, but Doug believes in the aliens and takes their preparations very seriously.

Everything changes in a hurry when Liv finds an alien stuck in one of the traps.

Sooooo, I had a hard time believing what these teens did after they found the alien. I couldn't believe the lack of compassion. And that lack is what led me to figure out the twist almost immediately. The story got so gory that I had to skim those sections.

There was a big climactic event at the end, and I also had difficulty believing that Liv would do what she did. That's all I'm going to say.

A pretty gruesome, depressing story that is well written, with well-developed characters and settings. It was just the story that I couldn't get into. So, science fiction fans may enjoy Bent Heavens a lot. There's nothing wrong with the execution. I just could buy it (and really didn't want to.)

Imagine that Stephen King wrote E.T., and you’ll have an idea of what’s it’s like to read Bent Heavens, the new science fiction horror novel by Daniel Kraus (co-author of the Shape of Water with Guillermo del Toro). It’s a fast-paced, somewhat horrifying story about teenage girl, Liv Fleming, whose father, Lee, disappears for good not long after returning from two years during which he claims to have been abducted by aliens. Despite the social, emotional, and psychological damage her father has done to his family in his little Iowa town, Liv and her best friend, Doug Monk, carry on his tradition of maintaining traps he set all around their yard, before his final disappearance, to catch any aliens that might come seeking to abduct him again. And hopefully, Liv can prove him right after all. When tension and conflict at high school become impossible for Liv, she decides it’s time to get over the loss of her father. She sets out to destroy the traps at last and end her living nightmare, and guess what she finds…

Bent Heavens is narrowed to so few characters for its 304 pages that it feels as claustrophobic as Liv’s father’s weapon-filled backyard shed. Aside from Liv and Doug, the story contains brief appearances by Liv’s mother, Liv’s love interest Bruno Mayorga (who happens to be an illegal “alien”), Liv’s English teacher (who has taken Liv’s father’s job at her school), a mysterious journalist named Carbajal, and few others. The characters are unique and well drawn, each with quirks that play into their roles in the story. Liv is kind and resourceful. Doug is a weird loner from a tough upbringing and loyal to a fault. Liv’s mother is battling an alcohol problem as a result of her husband’s insanity and final disappearance. Carbajal, the one person who might know something about Lee’s disappearance, is jaded and physically deformed. Together, they form an interesting ensemble, though at some points it seems they exist only to forward the intense plot.

The plot of Bent Heavens is very straightforward. Liv wants to find out what happened to her father so she can finally put the years’ long nightmare to bed. With some pretty effective jumping back and forth the plot covers the period beginning when Lee arrives naked at the town square after a two-year absence and proceeds through Liv’s desperate, harrowing, night-long quest to find out what happened to him after his second and final disappearance. Kraus does an excellent job of building tension throughout the novel by forcing Liv through a quick-hitting sequence of increasingly challenging complications, both physically and emotionally, from a fight with a teacher to a broken toe and more, until at last she must finally seek out answers on her own in the explosive—because what’s a big ending without some kind of explosions, right?—ending.

Kraus is an excellent writer, and what I most enjoyed about Bent Heavens is his ability, as story tension increased, to turn the most mundane of settings, an old and nearly forgotten Iowa farm town, into the creepiest collection of corn rows, woods, silos, and old farmhouses you would never want to be caught in alone. As Liv’s fear and horror increase, the settings, through her eyes, from Carbajal’s dark, stinking apartment in Nowheresville to the farmlands on the edge of America’s former self, become increasingly malignant and claustrophobic. The reader feels immersed not only in this backward, useless part of America’s erstwhile heartland, but also in Liv’s head, seeing things she really, really does not want to see but cannot avoid. It’s a gripping trip through a mind-boggling labyrinth that completely captures the intensity and strangeness of Liv’s quest.

Overall, I enjoyed Bent Heavens very much. If I had to complain about something (and I don’t but I will), much of the complexity of the plot (of which there isn’t much to begin with, which is okay) and its reveal is based on the kind of misunderstanding that happens in the telephone game. One person says something, and as it is passed on to others, the words get twisted and mistaken until the original meaning is lost. It’s a little bit gimmicky once, but more than once it becomes thematic, to what effect, I am still not sure. Perhaps, we live our lives thinking we understand things that we really don’t. I’m not sure if that’s what Kraus intended, but it fits.

Nevertheless, with regard to themes and authorial intention, Bent Heavens is fairly deep, exploring love and loss, family relationships, isolation, change, helplessness, revenge, brutality, and more. Though it may seem like a lot for a medium-length novel, the themes are deftly handled, thoughtful yet unobtrusive, with perhaps one exception. Bent Heavens is a cautionary tale, and the author even includes an explanation of such as an afterword. I won’t spoil it for those of you who might want to read this enjoyable and entertaining novel, but at some times, especially in the middle of the book, the skeletons of that cautionary tale can be seen a little too clearly through its skin and flesh. As such, Bent Heavens may make a better edge-of-your-seat paced movie, which I expect will follow, than a book in which the reader has time to dwell on each moment, each scene.

But is it grimdark? As the characters start to unravel the mystery of Lee’s disappearance, they definitely lose their moral compass, which lends itself to a major theme of the cautionary tale, which is probably why the publishers asked us to review it. The settings, even the mundane ones, are quite grim, and there is enough violence of sorts to be grimdark in a horror-novel sort of way. Overall, though, Liv never really loses her way. She is a hero, albeit one with plenty of regrets, but still a hero. So, if you’re looking for a very entertaining read that crosses the line between alien-contact science fiction and rural American horror, or even a fast-paced read with a strong female protagonist, Bent Heavens should be on your TBR. If you’re looking to stick to your traditional fighting fiction grimdark fantasy or sci-fi, this might not be it.

Bent Heavens is scheduled for release on 25 February 2020 in the US and 1 March 2020 in the UK and elsewhere.

This review was originally published in Grimdark Magazine #21
Buy Bent Heavens by Daniel Kraus

How far would you go for revenge? How much violence is there in an ordinary person? Liv begins this story as an ordinary teenager, then she discovers the alien she believes killed her father. This book is disturbing in its violence, but the story is fascinating. This one will stick with me awhile.

In the story. Bent Heavens, two adolescences are dealing with issues that plague a large portion of their population. We have learned that children grasp at what they know and perpetuate it into their vocabulary. The main character’s father appears suddenly in the middle of their town naked. She decides that this will not keep her from loving her father, but it goes impact the rest of her life. She creates her own path to follow along, in the meantime, she has to put a mystery together and figure out who or what the aliens are and why she has captured one of them in a series of traps her father created. Upper middle and higher will find this book interesting. There’s even an interwoven conspiracy in it.

Now that I'm finished with Bent Heavens, I can't stop thinking about it! I thoroughly enjoyed this book!

Thank you to NetGalley for my advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Quite a fun book to end my 2019 reading year on, but I will say that this book was not AT ALL what I expected. I was expecting a fun alien abduction story with a little bit of government conspiracy sprinkled in. Instead, this book is entirely government conspiracy. Still tons of fun and totally up my alley, just not what I thought it was going to be going in. Overall, really enjoyable. I'm giving it a 3.5/5 rounded up to a 4 for consistency's sake. My only real negative is that there was quite a bit of physical violence that wasn't my personal taste that I skimmed through.

Absolutely amazing. I love it when authors are not afraid to tackle incredibly difficult issues with a young adult cast of characters. The descent into obsession, anger, madness, and revenge was very well written. The twist was not exactly predictable but not exactly jaw dropping, but to be honest it wasn’t the point. The point of the book is what the circumstances DID to those who found themselves trapped in them. This reminded me of the Chaos Walking Trilogy, although slightly different especially in the direction the darkness took.