Review: The Haunted Forest Tour

The Haunted Forest Tour by Jeff Strand
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Excuse the pun, but this really kinda went off the rails.

The idea is this: A random forest sprouts in the desert, bringing with it a host of terrifying monsters. Four years later, it's basically Monster Jurassic Park, with tourists coming from all over the world to jump in a tram that travels through the forest, stopping regularly so that all the weird and murderous wonderful creatures can be seen. Naturally, things go horribly wrong.

I really love the premise. I'm a big fan of monsters, carnage, and Jurassic Park so I was really keen to get into this one, and the opening was a lot of fun and had me pretty excited.

Sadly, it was a little too much carnage and mayhem and not enough actual substance. The monsters were coming hard and fast so I never got a clear image of any of them, and all of the characters blended together for the longest time. Even when I finally figured out who was who, I still found it really hard to get a proper image of them. Example: Lee. He began as this snooty, sceptical author in my head but then kinda morphed into an action hero?

It also majorly bothered me how important it was to the author(s) that all of the women were drooled over by the men in the story. Every woman was the object of someone's leery affection, and it just left me with the impression that at least one of these authors is clearly in need of some loving. It would have been okay if it was just one gross, pervy dude and that was his personality but it was EVERY. SINGLE. MAN.

Then of course the overall plot was pretty thin and terrible so there was nothing really driving the story other than chaos and a lot of death. Characters were introduced and killed off in the same paragraph. The explanations followed no logic. The final showdown was absolutely pathetic. Bizarre choices were made. The characters had no growth. Also kind of no personalities. There was just so much of it that left me scratching my head.

I feel like, as an action movie, this would be in the realm of films like Sharknado. Like, it is just pointless and makes absolutely no sense at all but the gratuitous violence makes it hilariously worth it.

As a book, though, it just didn't work.

So many reasons it should have worked, and so many reasons why it didn't.

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