Woooo this book had me hot! Let’s Review.
Sacrificial Animals by Kailee Pedersen
- Category – Horror Fiction
- Length – 320 Pages
- Read Time – 10 Days
- GR Rating – 4 Stars
This is a heavy read, reader beware this book & review come with many trigger warnings. There are scenes of abuse of children & animals, verbal abuse, racism, homophobia, mention of parental loss & a ton of violence. I read this book back in September of last year kicking off my season of spooky reads, it was being promoted at the bookstore on the supernatural horrors table. While yes there’s definitely a supernatural element, it doesn’t really show up until the end of the book which threw me off initially. The first two-thirds of this book do not read supernatural at all.
We start the story in the now, Nick Morrow, youngest son of Carlyle Morrow, gets an urgent call from his father telling him he must come home, immediately. Not only must he go back to ‘Stag’s Crossing’, the huge agricultural property he was raised on, he must also bring his older brother, Joshua, with him. Unable to refuse his father, Nick instantly endeavors to convince Joshua to go back to the home he was banned from, back to the father who disowned him decades prior.
Believing that Carlyle was within his last days both sons reluctantly go to their father.
Chapters switch back & forth between past & present, we get a fairly thorough picture of what growing up on Stag’s Crossing was like. Although Carlyle is never described as having been a particularly kind person, he really becomes cruel to his sons after losing his wife. & that is no excuse! Grief is not an excuse for cruelty, grief is not an excuse for racism, grief is not an excuse for violence. There’s simply no excuse for being a shitty person & that’s what Carlyle was, all on his own, he was just a shit person. He treated his sons with disdain, as if they were but a burden to his life, animals to be trained & made obedient & efficient for the farm or be disposed of. The vast majority of the scenes of the past are colored by violence, wether that be physical violence against animals & people or the psychological violence both sons endured throughout their childhood. Carlyle is an extremely dislikable character & I cannot emphasize that enough.
As I said above, the supernatural aspect of this story is hiding deep in the shadows until basically the very end, most of the book reads as a horrid family drama. Children lose their mother very young, their father is an absolute piece of shit, they rarely if ever get to be carefree children, expected to conform to their fathers ideal of “good sons” & continue his farm. Throughout this book I kept waiting for something truly horrible to happen to Carlyle, & quite honestly I almost stopped reading it about half way through because it just wasn’t happening quickly enough for me. I know, what does that say about me as a person but I digress. Every “interaction” with Carlyle made me despise him more & more, by the time I was approximately half way through the book I was having a visceral, physical reaction to this character. I was physically getting hot, actually starting to sweat from the anger this character prompted in me. Ultimately, it is the chosen son, the favorite eldest son, Joshua, who ushers in his fathers end. While it is not directly at his hand, he does turn out to be the vessel that carries the poison, the steward to open the door of the Morrow families undoing.
& me oh my was it a glorious end. I’m glad I stuck it out with this book, definitely worth the read.
As always, thank you for joining me for another review & happy reading!
Hasta la próxima – V
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