A Chicago cul-de-sac is about to get a new neighbor…of the demonic kind.
Amy Foster considers herself lucky. After she left the city and moved to the suburbs, she found her place quickly with neighbors Liz, Jess, and Melissa, snarking together from the outskirts of the PTA crowd. One night during their monthly wine get-together, the crew concoct a plan for a clubhouse She Shed in Liz’s backyard–a space for just them, no spouses or kids allowed.
But the night after they christen the She Shed, things start to feel . . . off. They didn’t expect Liz’s little home-improvement project to release a demonic force that turns their quiet enclave into something out of a nightmare. And that’s before the homeowners’ association gets wind of it.
Even the calmest moms can’t justify the strange burn marks, self-moving dolls, and horrible smells surrounding their possessed friend, Liz. Together, Amy, Jess, and Melissa must fight the evil spirit to save Liz and the neighborhood . . . before the suburbs go completely to hell.
Suburban Hell
Maureen Kilmer
Suburban Hell appealed to me for a few different reasons. Upon first reading the synopsis I could tell the book was a lot of fun and I needed that in my reading life. Secondly, it’s fall now and the weather is cooler. I love reading seasonally. This one promised not only a fall setting but also a demon-run amuck in the suburbs.
How could I resist?
Written by Maureen Kilmer, Suburban Hell is about a group of friends that toast to each other to christen their she shed, which inadvertently cast a spell and unleashes something magical. What exactly gets unleashed is yet to be determined. In the days following the induction of the she shed horrifying events start to happen in their suburban neighborhood. Can this group of friends figure out what has been unleashed and how to reclaim it before it’s too late?
Yes, I did indeed have fun with this one as promised. It lightened the mood in between reading a lot of horror and thriller books. It didn’t exactly fill a huge hole in my reading life, and I’ll probably forget about this book by next week. But the rating reflects all of that so let’s get into the parts of the book that worked and the parts that didn’t.
When we look at the characters, neighbors Amy, Liz, Jess, and Melissa, they are not varied enough from one another. Trust me they were written to be different I’m sure defining characteristics were mentioned, yet each of the neighbors acted the same, had the same problems to overcome and solved them the same way. I imagined them as cardboard cut-outs, lacking depth and unable to stand without assistance.
I know I can’t expect fully fleshed-out characters in every book I read. However, in this book, I was left wondering why they needed half of the characters they had. It wouldn’t have detracted from the story if two of them were blown up in the first chapter.
Beyond the characters, the story was easy to follow, and there were seasonal elements, I finished it in short time, it provided relief and didn’t require a lot from me as a reader. Sometimes that adds up to a lot. Today, it added up to three.
Suburban Hell…⭐️⭐️⭐️
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