Review: Possess

Title: Possess
Author: Gretchen McNeil
Publisher: Balzar + Bray
Find it here: Amazon, Goodreads
Source: Purchased

Fifteen-year-old Bridget Liu just wants to be left alone: by her mom, by the cute son of a local police sergeant, and by the eerie voices she can suddenly and inexplicably hear. Unfortunately for Bridget, it turns out the voices are demons – and Bridget has the rare ability to banish them back to whatever hell they came from.

Terrified to tell people about her new power, Bridget confides in a local priest who enlists her help in increasingly dangerous cases of demonic possession. But just as she is starting to come to terms with her new power, Bridget receives a startling message from one of the demons. Now Bridget must unlock the secret to the demons' plan before someone close to her winds up dead – or worse, the human vessel of a demon king.

My take:

I bought this book for three reasons: 1.  I saw a whole bunch of bloggers get advanced copings and they all said they were super excited to read it and that it would be really good to read around Halloween because it sounds scary.  2. Gretchen McNeil was going to be at the Orange County Book Fair, signing and promoting her book on a panel of authors.  3.  The cover is incredibly creepy looking!  Honestly, these reasons aren't very good reasons to buy a book.  I hadn't actually read a single review before I purchased this book to gauge whether or not I would like it.  And let me tell you, my standards are not very high for horror books.  If it scars me, I like it.  

I'm not going to outright say it was a terrible book because it had it's scary parts like the room full of porcelain dolls scene.  But I could also tell that it was a debut novel and the authors very first book.  The setting was good, in my opinion, which helped to give it an ominous effect.  I'm pretty sure is was set in San Francisco so it was always foggy and added to the whole creep factor. 

The reason why it just didn't seem all that scary to me is because the main character never seemed genuinely scared.  Bridget is very snarky, which I normally like, but if all this crazy demon stuff was really happening, any normal person would be scared out of their pants, instead of constantly making funny remarks.  I would definitely classify this book as very light horror.  Side note: what priest in their right mind employs the help of a teenage girl to help him exercise demons!?!

In conclusion, it was an okay book, but if you're a hard-core horror fan such as I, skip this book.  It was disappointing.  Another book added to the "don't judge a book by it's cover shelf".