Book Review: Stolen Tongues by Felix Blackwell
Book Details
Date Read: October 10, 2022
Publication Date: June 2017
Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
Format: Digital Book
Page Count: 318
Listening Time: 9 hours 12 minutes
Print Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Stolen Tongues Book Review
Stolen Tongues by Felix Blackwell is complicated to review. I love Indie books and this one has the most intriguing start. It won a contest on Reddit’s horror community NoSleep and gained fan momentum ultimately propelling it to a book and soon a movie. That’s a heck of a story and piqued my interest immediately.
I can confidently say that the unsettling creepy factor is incredibly well-done. It doesn’t rely on gore, and it taps into most people’s most basic fears – the dark, the woods, your loved one becoming possessed, danger following you into your dreams, and a paranormal haunting in your home. I am not bothered by much in books, but I was strictly reading this in the daytime. Once I said out loud “oh hell no” and threw my kindle down lol.
But here’s the parts I struggled with and why it’s complicated to review. The characters were a bit flat for me, almost stereotypical at times, and it had that feeling in horror movies when you want to yell at the screen “what are you doing?!”. Maybe naivety is a nuance of the genre that is expected and I’m not well-versed enough in horror, but oof the stereotypes.
The big struggle though was on the Native American and Indigenous representation and drawing on a cultural lore. I don’t want to spoil this book for anyone and explain how this is relevant in the storyline, but I suspect this book would benefit greatly from a sensitivity read and it did detract from fully loving the novel. I appreciate books that tell a horror story rooted in cultural lore, I’ve read several that have done this exceptionally well, this book just missed the mark a bit.
Ultimately, I can’t broadly recommend this book. I can say that if you want a book that has the potential to steal your sleep with unnerving spookiness, this will likely do it. Beyond that, it wasn’t the book for me.
Content warnings: Body horror, Death, Suicidal thoughts, Child death, Miscarriage, Ableism, Mental illness
