Review: UNDER by Abigail Blakely

It all begins with a woman waking up in a dark and desolate environment. She doesn't know where she is or how she got there. She doesn't even remember putting on a green dress. In fact, she can't even remember her own name. When she encounters a boy claiming to be "no one," she's desperate for answers, so he tells her that's she's dead. But that's impossible.

At first, she doesn't believe it, until she becomes surrounded by grotesque monsters and foul creatures. Then she begins to wonder: maybe she is in Hell? But, instead, they call it Under, a place the dead have fallen into to wander aimlessly in dark shambles.

The story instantly grabbed me with its alluring mystery. Of course, anything involving death usually has a compelling mystery behind it. But this one had an interesting spin on it. Named after an object that they died with, these characters are lost souls, carrying an air of grim despair and misery. Our main character is called Key, named for the key she was left with. Though the idea of naming each character after an object was clever, I also thought there were just a few too many characters to keep track of.

Suddenly, news spreads of a murder. How could somebody murder the dead? You can't kill something that's already dead. That tidbit was very unsettling. It just didn't make sense.  So, with a killer on the loose, everyone in Under was in a frenzy, and then Key begins to wonder if the key she has could be the answer to something. After all, "every key unlocks something."

All in all, the book was well-written and the story carried an exquisite element that combined horror, mystery, and fantasy. In fact, I could almost see this turning into a Tim Burton film. Story had its morbid, odd-ball characters with a twisted, nonsensical plot. The mystery was certainly interesting, but the whole thing was just a big, dark maze that the reader has to blindly fumble through, meaning that you hardly know what's going on and you can't see where you're going. And I guess that was the beauty of this story, but I just felt like I was running into too many walls with it. It's not bad, it's not good. It was okay.

 

My rating: 3 stars