If you want to find a beautiful/chilling story different from most Christmas tales. That is heart-wretchint but satisfying and surprising heartfelt at times. Look no further! Happy YuleTide everyone 💜, sometimes it's good to be terrible 😈

I was very much not a fan of this book for the most part. In the first place, I found it to be entirely too long. The author dragged out the conversations between some of the characters unnecessarily; in my opinion this was especially true between Jesse and his ex-wife. Some of their longer dialogue was necessary towards the beginning to establish their history, but it became repetitive even within the same dialogue block. Jesse's inner dialogue was the same: repeating the same self-deprecating comments verbatim constantly for the first half of the book. 

I'm also not a fan of long monologues in novels. This may seem a little hypocritical for those who read my reviews but it's just my preference. Most of the characters have at least one long monologue that doesn't though it may establish some key background or plot point, goes on much longer than necessary for the story, Brom tending to go off on tangents. Krampus and Jesse have more of this than others; Krampus' tangents also tending towards societal commentary rather than being 100% relevant to the story. (If this is your thing, great! It's just not mine unless that's what the book is supposed to be about.) 

I found the pacing to be quite off as well. I was only 53% through the book and made a note that 98% of Jesse's story was already finished. Then I made a second note at 58% that Krampus' story was 98% finished. As a 16+ hour long audiobook, that made it difficult to continue. I really only pushed through because this was a book club book. With 7+ hours to go and both stories mostly finished, what was going on? There are also strange gaps in the middle of chapters where POV changes that in my opinion should have just been chapter breaks. A majority of the chapters were 45-70 minutes long, so there was no reason they couldn't have been broken up further in most of these cases. It just made for awkward listening with the long silent gaps. 

I did enjoy the merging of Norse mythology into modern day Christmas stories. I thought the ending became a little confusing in this respect but it did have a bit of a Neil Gaiman American Gods feel. I think the concept was well thought out and had good bones, I just did not think the narrative style it was written in was the best. I also don't really see it as horror, it was more action+gore to me.