This was a very fun and dark holiday-themed book that introduced us to an advent calendar reading experience that worked fairly well. The premise of the novel was very enticing: a family trying to take a fun, family-saving (why the family trouble you ask? I dunno, the author never really said) holiday away in the boondocks to reconnect are met with strange happens that escalate into full-blown terror via kidnapping, bullets, dead-things, and all kinds of bad stuff. 

The overall story was good: it was very captivating and kept me wanting to read more. I just think the execution could have been tightened up a bit. The chapters were very short, so reading this novel as an advent calendar was a bit of a chore because after reading 5-10 pages, you were done for the day, and sometimes the events seemed like they were stretched a bit too far to make the advent calendar theme work. I think I'm nit-picking at that point, and it wasn't that big of a deal, I just wanted to gobble up the story and didn't want to wait haha 

The ending was great too (no spoilers) and I think I need to check out some more titles by this author to see how things are put together when not in this format.