This story is about two childhood friends, Roger and Tooth, who get together for the summer after Roger’s first year of college. Roger, a comic geek, and Tooth, a rowdy hard drinker, are looking forward to the entire summer ahead of them. While out shooting Tooth’s guns in a remote wooded area they hear the sounds of screaming. Deciding to investigate they come across a battered half dead woman and unfortunately right behind her, a completely evil psychopath and his two attack dogs, hell bent on bringing her back to his house.

After a brief struggle the two boys find themselves held captive in the psycho’s torture chamber cellar. Chained to the walls the boys must try to figure out how to escape in between bouts of horrific torture.

Holy crap this book is intense! I was lulled into a false sense of security in the beginning, reading about the boys’ escapades. The banter between the two had me rolling. I should’ve known better than to let my guard down. After the capture all the hilarity went right out the window as I was treated to some of the vilest descriptions of brutality I have ever read. This book is everything you wished Hostel was.

Author Ryan C. Thomas did a tremendous job filling my head with terrible images. This is another book I had to read in the daytime. After I finished I had to scrub out my brain with chick lit. I had to force myself not to turn to the end just to reassure myself that somehow, someway, things would turn out all right. Well there’s all right and then there’s alive. Don’t look for rainbows here.

This is an excellent first novel; I look forward to reading more.

This book is harsh, but as I read it I found myself becoming desensitized to it as I went along. Each chapter, once the torture begins, seems to try and one up itself each time and by the third roll of the dice, I was like “OK where is this going?”, but it just leads into another role of the dice and severing of some flesh.

I just felt a lot of it was over the top at times and some of the acts of violence that occur would have but someone in the grave almost as soon as they happened. I also hated the character of Roger, he was a complete and total fan boy puss. I kind of liked Tooth, ‘cause he was a tough sum’bitch, but Roger was just a dick and a whiney dick at that.

All and all for a first book, Thomas does do a pretty good job at delivering the disgust. The best way to describe this book would be like reading the screen play for I Spit On Your Grave, without ever seeing the movie. I also could not read the story without seeing Bill Moseley in the role of the “Skinny Man”, a whacked out and demented hillbilly if there ever was one.

There was just to much shock value put into this one and to much left out for a better ending of some kind and the opening story arc was really not needed at all.

At a touch over 200 pages you can blow through this one in a day or two, but if your not into torture and cruelty leave it on the shelf, if you are however than this one will be a blockbuster for you.

5 of 10 as a straight up read.
9 of 10 as a gruesome, gore hound’s version of Moby Dick

Also it shows the noble rottweiler in a very bad light.