Run (Patti Larsen)

Run
The Hunted series, Book 1
Patti Larsen
Purely Paranormal Press
Fiction, YA Horror
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: After years in the foster care system following the deaths of his parents, Reid's life was finally about to get on track... until he wakes up in the back of a van, blindfolded and bound, only to be dumped in the middle of a trackless forest. It seems like a prank - until he finds the eviscerated body, a boy just about his age spiked to a tree. Then he hears the howls, and sees the hunters. Impossibly fast, impossibly deadly, impossibly inhuman, they stalk the woods hunting children like him.
There's no way out. There's no safe haven. There's only the forest, the monsters, and one way to survive: run.

REVIEW: Run has a premise as old as horror itself, perhaps as old as human consciousness: the fear of the omnipresent, inscrutable predator. Larsen mixes in some paranormal seasoning with the hunters, and adds a dash of Lord of the Flies as Reid meets (and loses, as often as not) other trapped children and teens in the forest of horrors. It makes for a heady mix, at least at first. After a while, though, it starts feeling a little repetitive and manipulated, not to mention a touch drawn out.
Reid starts out with a slight advantage, thanks to his late father's passion for survival camping, and is driven by more than mere personal survival: his older sister, Lucy, might well be one of the other victims of whomever kidnapped him for use as monster food. The hunters have a way of turning up at plot-convenient times and melting away, though this plays into an overall sense of absolute power: they own this wilderness, and take perverse pleasure in torturing their captive prey. At some point, the fear and near-catches become numbing, especially as Reid wavers on his motivation, whether he's becoming a prey animal purely interested in his own immediate survival or if he's retaining enough humanity to care for others and try to think his way out; this wavering becomes nearly whiplash-inducing in the buildup to the climax, as he twists back and forth in his own head. As a means to ramp up extra tension, it quickly loses its effectiveness and just becomes annoying, especially when everyone's in a survival situation without the luxury of time for moral or philosophical dilemmas. The gore can be a bit extreme, and some of the incidents (and deaths) feel manipulative, particularly at the end as Larsen pushes the cast on to the next installment/phase of terror. By then, I was worn out by the whole thing.
Parts of Run are fine horror, steeped in panic and paranoia and monsters in the moonlight. I'm just not sure there's enough substance for another book in this setting, or that Reid has the character presence to pull off a series.

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