Review: The Hellsblood Bride by Chuck Wendig

Summary

Yes, we’re going back deep underground for another twelve rounds with Mookie Pearl. Father, barkeep, former Mafioso, ruler of his subterranean crime-kingdom. The Organization is back, and they’ll do anything to get Mookie on board, but Mookie has gone legit, and it’s taking every ounce of effort for him to keep his new bar from crashing and burning. To top it all, his daughter is missing, and when Nora’s not in plain sight, that’s usually a sign of bad things to come! On one hand, the Organization. On the other, Nora. Why can’t Family ever be easy?

My thoughts

The Hellsblood Pride delivers the same kind of story that The Blue Blazed does: a brutal, violent and morbid story that is definitely worth reading if you like it dark. 
It is not one of those books that suffers second book syndrome and it matches up to its predecessor. I didn’t enjoy it as much though and this is definitely a case of “it’s me, not you”.

At the beginning I had the problem that I remembered absolutely nothing from the previous book. The Hellsblood Bride picks off where we left Mookie behind in book one and I had no idea what was going on. Smaller references didn’t tell me anything until we finally reached a point where I got some kind of summary. And even then I was still somewhat clueless to what happened in The Blue Blazes. It’s just been too long and I should have re-read the first book to have a better start with this one. Especially as I only remembered two characters of a bigger group.

I’m not sure if I felt different while reading the first book, but during this one I constantly thought “I don’t really care”. These characters are all at a shitty place in life and want to get out and I didn’t care. I didn’t care when they were hurt. I didn’t care if they were going to be successful or died during their attempt to get out of this shithole they are stuck in. I just didn’t feel anything for them. I assume it wasn’t that different from reading the first book but then it was something new and exciting, like I had never read before.

Nevertheless, it was still some epic fucked up story with a lot of action. There wasn’t a single chapter that bored me. I’m not sure how I feel about the end though. I was expecting some bigger showdown but what I got instead… it felt more like a summary. It was over too fast.

I wouldn’t say I was disappointed in The Hellsblood Bride, I still enjoyed it a great deal. It just wasn’t the kind of story I couldn’t stop reading or would have stayed up all night for. It was good and on the same level as The Blue Blazes but I didn’t love it.