This book sounded exactly like my cup of tea. A creepy Stephen King-esque small town murder mystery? Sign me up. If that wasn’t enough, the delightfully creepy cover definitely was. I had the sudden urge of reading something creepy (bear with my overuse of ‘creepy’). Something messed up. And the Chalk Man had been on my list for a while.
This book was just unsettling enough to keep me waiting for something to happen, except that something never came. Sure, things do happen, there’s murder and a good amount of gore. But it falls flat.
There’s too much going on, all at once. It got confusing going back and forth from the 1986 and 2016 chapters, I had to go reread older chapters to understand stuff. I will say that I did like that eventual mystery it set up – until the ending.
Maybe I could have liked this book better if it hadn’t ended that way. The last chapter ties things together very loosely, a lackluster ending to all that build up. Which was also something I could have lived with, but what really, truly, ruined the book for me was this completely unnecessary twist at the last two pages that makes zero sense. It feels like it was thrown in just for shock value.
I liked how at least the book doesn’t drag on, things move pretty quickly, and it was still easy to read in one sitting.
But overall it feels like some run of the mill thriller and doesn’t have anything that actually unsettles you or creeps you out. I have another one of the author’s books, The Burning Girls, which I still want to read, but this one was a let down. There are way better books of this sort out there, but the Chalk Man isn’t one worth reading.
Rating: 2 out of 5
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