Thank you to NetGalley, Histria Books, and Scott Eveloff for allowing me to read an ARC of this title and experience the history of the Holocaust, the strength of the Jewish people, and magic of the Golem in all its fantastical glory.

This book is a fascinating gem of a tale, combining historical facts and a magical world with characters stemming from folklore that will leave you feeling all kinds of ways!

Where do I even begin with this review?! To have so many words to describe how this story made me feel and yet be so speechless and unable to gather accurate thoughts; is just astounding.

I have been captivated by the history of the Holocaust and the journeys of people throughout the time of World War II, and I am fairly new to all of the facts despite learning about everything when I was younger. As an adult, especially in today's world, it can be very revealing to the human mind and spirit, just how similar our times are becoming. It is crazy to see how evil, how angry, how proud, and how arrogant some humans can be. Caring so little of other lives, empowering their thoughts and others who think like them, scolding and hurting those who do not fit into that mold.

That in of itself is scary and is why I am claiming this story to be more of a horror than a fantasy, even though it has fictional elements.

Praise for the horror elements and explicit message of The Golem's Holocaust!

I am a big horror reader, especially in subgenres of extreme horror, splatterpunk, and titles that push the envelope on plot, theme, gore, and emotion. The Golem's Holocaust was expertly written to surpass most of the horror books I have read, simply by pulling on the fact that these events were real and foreshadowed a future still surrounded by hate. It is a brutally difficult read but worth every second. It had a lot of brutal death, violence, blood, gruesome scenes, and descriptive deaths. It is about the Holocaust so obviously you can expect it, but extreme horror authors and readers, this one will give you nightmares.

Actually, it does more than that. The author brilliantly used words illustrating concise settings, vivid imagery, unsettling descriptions, smooth dialogue, and bullet points of facts scattered within an imaginative prose that dived so deeply into the reader's heart. Streaks of humanity, filtered with disgrace, rage, passion, and a desire to finish the entire book in one sitting.

I couldn't do anything but read this book. When it was done, I couldn't sleep. When it releases, I will be buying a physical copy for my shelves.

Whether you enjoy historical fiction, historical fantasy, folklore, exquisite heroes of fantasy, horror in all its disturbing qualities, or simply need something new to read. Pick up this book! You won't be disappointed.

I love Golem stories, which are based on Jewish mythological tales about a creature made from clay or mud created to protect the Jewish people. My favorite is “The Golem and the Jinni” by Helene Wecker, while the utterly fabulous, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” by Michael Chabon, cleverly weaves the famous Golem of Prague legend into a 20th-century story of fleeing Naziism, immigrating to America, and fulfilling the American dream.

This book, “The Golem's Holocaust,” imagines a golem created amidst the destruction of the Holocaust born amongst the deaths of hundreds of Jewish men, women, and children in a Nazi concentration camp to save a young Jewish girl and, with her, the rest of the Jewish people. The book begins with several lyrical, poetic, and metaphorical passages that are a joy to read, each following closely on the heels of another.

The author, Scott Eveloff, compares Nazi soldiers’ strutting to that of gray-clad gods and describes the unloading of people from transport trains as the cars vomiting human cargo and alternatively as tumbling from the cars in a grotesque parody of toys spilling from their shelves. The rest of the story isn’t quite as evocatively descriptive, unless you consider the gruesome descriptions of the destruction wrought by the golem against those considered “Evils” in the pursuit of protecting the girl and the Jewish people. However, it is eminently and propulsively readable, as Mr. Eveloff adroitly uses the golem’s existence to explain many of the real events and atrocities of the Holocaust.

Near the end of the story, the young Jewish girl plaintively asks “her” golem when the pain, and evil, and indiscriminate killing of the Jews will stop and asks why the world hates the Jews so much. Unfortunately, that question is as pertinent today as it was during World War Two. The author ends the book with his assertion that without the golem there may have been no holocaust, but without the Holocaust there would have been no Israel. This isn’t true even within his own plot, as the golem came to life after the deaths of hundreds inside a concentration camp. Further, historians generally agree that Israel would exist even had the Holocaust not happened because its groundwork had been laid decades earlier.

Despite my overall enjoyment of “The Golem's Holocaust,” there’s one sentence midway through the book I found unforgivably corny. The golem is looking for the girl after having been separated and thinks he sees her emerge from a building but quickly loses sight of her. Evils suddenly appear, so he thinks maybe the girl still is inside the building amongst other children he can see and that he was mistaken when he thought he saw her exit — at least this is the straw at which he decides to grasp! Really? The golem is grasping at straws? I’m still rolling my eyes!