Infested

I have such mixed reviews about this book. Before I really dive in though I want to say holy insect horror. With a book called "Infested" and a bunch of cockroaches on the cover - I'd assume it was going to have some insect horror. But I was not ready for the detail and the scenes including them. They were phenomenal. Horror book should never hold back with the intense scenes of grotesques to give that ick factor and Colon did exactly that. As this is also a YA novel, it didn't go too far. I really commend him on these fantastic scenes where my skin was crawling along with Manny's. The plot itself was interesting but the generic reasoning of why this was happening was not. I loved the writing and the scenes and I wish it was just more than (see SPOILERS below) what was provided. This really dampened it for me but I was so far into the book that I wanted to see it through.

I really wanted to be annoyed by Manny's personality about the move and his attitude towards his parent but I could not. It's so realistic for him to act the way he did because I know I would have felt the same. Honestly, any teenager going into their senior year of high school under the same situation would probably felt the same. So once I sat back and accepted that his attitude was exactly as it should be, I liked Manny. I liked how Manny became into his own and figured out himself. Sure he kept complaining but he started to see things differently. And who wouldn't be mad when there is a bunch of cockroaches in the building they moved into?

Overall, Infested by Angel Luis Colon did a fantastic job bringing that insect horror to life. I loved his descriptions and he honestly did an amazing job keeping it within its intended genre but keeping true to horror. The plot in general was good but the reasoning behind felt so unoriginal and generic to me. As soon as it was brought to light my enjoyment of the book came down. I just wish it went a different route with more of a unique reasoning. This would have done this book more justice with how well the horror portion was written. I still would absolutely recommend this book to anyone who enjoys horror - if you have a bug phobia though, beware!

SPOILERS BELOW!!!!


*Spoiler warning - do not read if you don't want to be spoiled*
I enjoyed the paranormal aspect of the book but when it was determined that the reasoning behind the bad guys burning of buildings and now infestation of this one was because of racism - it just felt so disappointing. Why couldn't a bad guy just be like, I like doing bad things or I like fire or wow, I got a lot of money from a fire, lets do it again! But an old German white male doing all this because of racism... I felt like this generic reasoning just felt shoed in instead of taking time to come up with a unique motive.