Depraved by Bryan Smith (CBR-III #22)

Cannonball Read III: Book #22/52
Published: 2009
Pages: 336 (10,127 total so far)
Genre: Horror/Survival

Depraved is yet another entry into the backwoods-rednecks-who-kill-and-eat-people genre of horror. Basically, there's a whole town full of crazy rednecks of like to capture people passing through and torture them before they eat them.

I love a good horror story, but unfortunately this one was less than stellar. So for this review, I'm going to make a list of reasons why I didn't care for this book.

-The rape. Dear God THE RAPING. Seriously, I have never seen a book with so much rape in my life. There was male-on-male rape, female-on-female rape, male-on-female rape, female-on-male rape...you get the picture? And a lot of it was completely ridiculous - half the time, the victims are raping other prisoners that are trapped with them.

-There were way too many characters. The book kept cutting back and forth between like four sets of characters and it got really confusing. They're all pretty much being caught, raped and/or tortured, or running away from the crazy rednecks. So it was really hard to tell all the similar stories apart when you're constantly going being thrown in and out of different people's escape stories.

-There were also too many killing redneck families. Usually these types of stories have one crazy family, but this one had a whole community, so it was hard to keep track of all that as well.

-Apparently, this town has been kidnapping and murdering people for decades. So, how come all of a sudden EVERY SINGLE ONE of their captors escape at the same time without having anything to do with one another?

-I don't get the whole "supernatural" element they seemed to add randomly. There's this half demon/half man thing thrown in there for no apparent reason. It didn't add anything to the story at all.

-I hated the characters. I didn't care about a single one of them, probably because they were all just as bad as the "bad guys" who were kidnapping and torturing them. As soon as they escaped (or sometimes even before) they were all torturing/killing/raping people as well.

Depraved definitely lives up to it's title, but I'd suggest checking out Endurance by Jack Kilborn or Off Season by Jack Ketchum instead.