Thank you so much to net galley and the publisher for giving me a copy of this book! The characters and story line I didn’t really care for but it was definitely a interesting take on modern zombies!

Terrifying thrill ride. Grabs you and doesn't let go. Well written and fast read. Would definitely think most would enjoy this one.

I wanted to love this but unfortunately I DNF'd it. The middle started to drag a little bit and I lost interest in what was happening. The concept was intriguing to me, but the execution just didn't make much sense.

Turner Falls is a small tourist town. When a science experiment goes completely wrong, violence breaks out across the town. Can the town end the violence, or will to kill them all?

it was just an Ok read for from the start, even though I can see why some people might like it but there just wasn't a wow factor for me, yes it was strange but it just didn't seem to pull in to the story at all. There was a few times I would put it down and then pick something else up which is sad because I love reading books that are strange but this one just didn't make the cut.

Wild story from Johnson. Lots of action - some social commentary thrown in. Definitely horror elements. Fans of Crichton and King should enjoy this one

The Loop is a story of the perfect small mountain town of Turner Falls, OR, vacation destination and home to a small biotech company. Lucy is a teenage outcast, her only real friend is Bucket. She’s keen to notice the weird things going on in town, and then everything goes to shit.

I love a horror or a thriller or a horror/thriller, and I especially love the ones that don’t take themselves too seriously. This is one of those. If you like hiveminds, tentacles, zombies, lots of blood and guts and gore, this is the place for you. Welcome. I think the plot was very well done, I fell in love with the main characters, and I was genuinely terrified throughout certain scenes. It’s being billed as World War Z meets Stranger Things, and I think the comparison is apt. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an advanced copy!

Holy moly, what a ride. If you are looking for a positive revolution to your semi-apocalyptic fiction, this definitely isn’t the book for you. Even though we know about 2/3 of the way through that no one is getting out alive, that ending was still a gut punch! This was an excellent thrill ride and I look forward to hearing more from this author.

The Loop is a twist, gory, edge of your seat thrill ride through teenage social dynamics gone to the extreme!
An end of the year party in a cave goes crazy as some mysterious behavior quickly turns deadly and puts the outcast heroes on the run.

The descriptions and action are very immersive as they bounce from one deadly situation to the next, hatch plans, and try to do the best they can trapped in a small town quickly getting overrun by something out of control.

Very fun action, not for the squeamish!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Wow! This book was amazing start to finish. I was able to plow through this book in one sitting into the night. The story line held my attention and the characters were amazingly written. This book is definitely a must read for any sci-fi or horror reader. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced reader copy.

Okay, so <u>The Loop</u> was a weird, wild ride that I still haven't fully comprehended. I'm not quite sure it even <i>made sense</i>. But I also, strangely kind of liked it?

I really like science experiments gone wrong. However, this was just . . . an odd sort of events. It takes forever to get anything explained, and there's no buildup toward the reveal. It's just strange occurrences happening and you're along for the ride.

I admire Lucy, the main character. She's strong, independent, and on the mission to get shit done even if it means taking things into her own hands and sacrificing herself. This is even after losing friends and family left and right!

This book is gruesome. There is no fluff. It has a lot of death. It was an interesting read. If you're into that kind of thing, then I think <u>The Loop</u> is definitely for you. There's even a podcast element at the beginning of each chapter!

This book started off great. I was really hooked and enjoying it at the beginning. The main characters that we started off with were interesting and the setup for the story was very intriguing. At about the half way point, several characters felt somewhat thrown in and the story seemed to have lost it's way. What made the book so good at the beginning really changed, and my interest just went down after that. Just an ok book for me, between 2 and 3 stars.

A pretty good horror/sci-fi novel with sympathetic leads, nearly non-stop action, and a lot of gross-outs.

The POV character, Lucy, is a teenage girl written in an unusually well-rounded way. She's great, and so are some of the other major characters. But at the same time, I had trouble envisioning the setting (and is it supposed to be now? the near future?), and the horror in this book overall tends towards an overreliance on supposedly "edgy" sexualized violence that detracts from some of the more nuanced sociological and psychological elements. I also think there are perhaps too many ideas all stuck together. Hey, at least that's better than too few.

Far darker and gorier than I had been led to expect from all the Stranger Things comparisons and reviews calling it YA, which was perfectly suited to my macabre tastes. It's a fun and propulsive story held back from an unqualified recommendation due to the paper-thin characters. But don't let that stop you from reading if you enjoy fictitious teenagers dying gruesomely.

The Loop

#50states50horrorbooks -Oregon

“The Loop” is a solid book but its definitely YA.

Something is happening to the teens in the small town of Turner Falls, Oregon. The story begins when the three children of executives from the Biotech firm Imtech become murderously violent.

I loved the characters in this book. The friendship, banter and teenage angst was so entertaining. Our main protagonist, Lucy, was so fun to read. She is smart and witty loner who makes friends with Bucket, another loner. Later in the story they meet Brewer. These three teenagers are really the heart of the story when they come face to face with bio-engineering gone wrong.

I did have a hard time getting into this book and was not fully invested until about fifty plus pages into it. “The Loop” had a relatively slow start but the pace eventually quickens. I found myself skimming the podcast chapters which were filled with conspiracy theories. Once the story took off, I could not stop reading it. The book definitely had some tense horror filled moments and the ending was definitely unexpected.

It you can ignore the slow pace and have a high tolerance for gore, this twisty action packed book might be perfect for you.

4 ⭐️

I received a eARC of The Loop from NetGalley prior to September in 2020 but ended up buying and listening to the Audible edition instead when I saw it was on sale as a Daily Deal last month in March. Inés del Castillo's narration was just what I needed to be sucked into it all.

Right from the start we know something is going on at Turner Falls, the Nightwatchman podcast having done some investigating on it but most people of Turner Falls apparently don't take Nightwatchman podcast seriously. Our eyes and ears in Turner Falls? Lucy.

Lucy, a adopted orphan from Peru with a traumatic past involving absent alcoholic parents and the car crash that killed them, being a "ghost" on the streets and bullying by other children, until adopted by the Hendersons and moved to Turner Falls, Oregon, has already, clearly, been juggling a lot, for a long time. A outcast among the rich and white teens of Turner Falls and Spring Meadows, she's witness with her class to the breakdown of a classmate who blinds another student, that turns into a murder of her teacher - and the "police" who murder her classmate.

Lucy, surviving that, goes with her best friend Bakhit "Bucket" Marwani and Danny Brewer (who has a crush on her) to a graduation party in some caves in the desert. It turns into the a nightmare of science gone very wrong, INTECH being behind a project called "Oracle" that turns teens into blue eyed and twitchy, seeking only to scratch a itch to cruelty for the feeling of 'pleasure', a loop they can't escape.

I enjoyed this book for the most part. It’s a horror/sci-fi that the publisher billed as Stranger Things X World War Z. Really the thing it reminded me most of though, was the movie Disturbing Behavior. I was super into the plot and finding out what the heck was going on to all the kids in the town. I really enjoyed the main character, Lucy, and thought she was developed really well. I enjoyed her banter with her best friend Bucket and sort of love interest, Brewer. Where it started to fall flat for me was once they found Steve, the guy who works for IMTECH and were filled in on what was going on, a lot of it got repetitive and boring. I also wasn’t fond of the over the top gore. I mean some of it needed to be there to show the gravity of the situation, and the depravity of the thing inside the people, but there were a lot of times where it was just unnecessary. I was happy that towards the end it gets exciting again, and I really enjoyed the ending. I think it was the only way really to end the book. Any other ending wouldn’t have felt right. I would recommend this book to people who don’t mind gore and enjoy dystopian/zombie type books. There are no zombies in this books, but it has that feel. I gave this book 3 stars.

My Goodreads notes while reading this should give you an idea of the type of book The Loop is:

‘WTF Oregon why u so crazy?‘

and

‘Well, holy shit.’

The story centers around Lucy and Bucket. They’re the only two students of color in their Podunk little town’s Podunk little high school. If you’ve ever been to Oregon, you’d probably recognize the believability of this. Get 4 feet outside the metro areas and it’s pretty much just an endless sea of white faces and Vidalia onions. Clearly I’m grossly over-simplifying, but you get my point, yes?). They find themselves in the center of a huge conspiracy perpetrated by IMTECH, the local biotech conglomerate.

“They rename you ‘test subject’ or ‘enemy,’ or they assign you a race or a nation or a class—and then they don’t have to think about you anymore.”
If I’ve learned anything in my 35 years, it’s that you should definitely always trust biotech firms. Always.

Wait, is that right? It’s right, isn’t it? Definitely nothing problematic will result from fucking around with any of the potentially sketchy aspects of biotech… All will end well.

Obviously that is incredibly not true.

See, in The Loop, like in life, it’s all fine and dandy until some asshole decides that making Scrooge McDuck money is more important than the human lives. I’m not going to tell you what’s going on here, because I’m not a Spoiler Blog, but suffice to say shit is fucked up.

And Lucy is a really wonderful, nuanced character. Honestly this whole book just reads a like a really action packed, scary sci-fi movie. It’s perfectly paced, there’s a lot of tense, scary scenes, and it’s just a hell of a good time. I can see why this was nominated for a Goodreads Choice Awards. This one definitely deserves all the hype.

Holy. Moly. The Loop was a whole ass whirlwind, and I was not ready for it. This book has been described as Stranger Things meets The X-Files and Stephen King. I was obviously sold by that description, as those are all on my list of most favorite things.

Small-town Turner Falls, Oregon. It's a place where some weird things have happened. Enough so that it's on the radar of the Nightwatchman podcast - a podcast that knows the truth is out there. After a student totally freaks and attacks a classmate and teacher, things only get weirder. Violent episodes begin rising among the teens in town, and everyone else? Basically catatonic. So together, Lucy, Bucket, and Brewer fight through the night to stay alive and save the town.

More than anything, The Loop is very Stephen King-esque, down to the triggers and content warnings. This book is very intense, gorey, and possibly offensive, depending on your own personal preferences. But that's all to say that there's a lot going on in this story, and if you're easily triggered then this may not be the book for you. But if you love Stephen King or Stephen Graham Jones, you'll definitely want to snatch this book up.

But this book is incredible. It pulled me in straight from the first page. It literally starts with murder and mystery, but then goes down this insanely violent hole that becomes a science fiction fright. The story-telling is intriguing. It's impossible to turn away from the plot and the way it's all put together. But I also love the way that the podcast is weaved into the story ultimately becoming a bit more integral within the plot.

I like that there were conversations about race and how people are treated differently based on their skin color. I think those conversations are important to have, and I especially love that the badass female main character is Peruvian with a best friend who's Pakistani. The book, while absolutely a sci-fi horror story, is also a story of more honest, real-life horror - the dangers of racism and classism. The difference between affluent teens and those who have to fend for themselves, and where they all end up in the end.

"This has always been inside of me, but I never let it out. I was a ghost instead. For too long." - The Loop, Jeremy Robert Johnson

I loved this book. As mentioned, the story-telling is incredible. I loved the plot and the MCs. I'm not sure I've ever read a book so fast-paced from beginning to end. The saying "they pulled out all the stops" rings so true, because there's not one bit of this book that even began to slow down. It was thrilling and terrifying and so smart, not to mention very witty and full of pop culture references. This was my first time reading anything JRJ, but if The Loop is indicative of his other works, count me in.

Jeremy Robert Johnson doesn't leave his characters behind in a gory, propulsive narrative that bolts forth, crashes expectations and keeps going. Thoughtful, exciting and characters that have the depth needed for the sense of loss you're bound to experience when everyone is put in the most horrific situations imaginable.
Highly recommended.