The Loop by Jeremy Robert Johnson

I would like to thank Titan for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Titan

Published – Out Now

Price – £4.68 Kindle eBook £8.99 paperback

Stranger Things meets The X-Files in this heart-racing conspiracy thriller as a lonely young woman teams up with a group of fellow outcasts to survive the night in a town overcome by a science experiment gone wrong.

Something sinister lurks beneath the sleepy tourist town of Turner Falls nestled in the hills of central Oregon. A growing spate of mysterious disappearances and frenzied outbursts threaten the town's idyllic reputation until an inexplicable epidemic of violence spills out over the unsuspecting city.

When the teenage children of several executives from the local biotech firm become ill and hyper-aggressive, the strange signal they can hear starts to spread from person to person, sending anyone who hears it into a murderous rage. Lucy and her outcast friends must fight to survive the night and get the hell out of town, before the loop gets them too.

A quick DNF review. Lucy is a high school student who witnesses a horrific event where one of her pupils seems to go mad attacking a fellow pupil and teacher in front before being shot themselves. Lucy goes to a teenage drinking party on caves and sees even more violence. Lucy keeps pondering her life as she and her best friend are non-white kids in this exclusive school she detests.

This for me became a novel where stuff happened but there was no exploration of consequences. I was struggling to believe that US pupils who have seen such a violent event would just shrug it off as something weird. The authors use of non-white characters felt very clumsy highlighting their race but very shallow characterisation to them beyond that beyond that and the plot seemed both very slow and predictable. By a hundred pages I did not care for anything in it as it felt a hollow story– sadly not one for me.