Book Review – CREED by Leaver and Currie

Elijah Hawkins needs to die. Slowly. Painfully. Tortured until his pleads for mercy only serve to fuel my inner demon. Needless to say, I am not a fan of the man, which is why he was so perfectly written.

When I started reading CREED by Trisha Leaver and Lindsay Currie, I was expecting to hide under the covers – that it would be totally terrifying, but I didn’t find it scary. Instead I found it ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY, RAGE-INDUCING! I burned through the novel in a matter of hours on a Sunday afternoon, unable to put the sucker down because I was begging, PLEADING, for Elijah to D-I-E. Now, I’m not going to say if the pervert meets his fork-tailed maker or not, BUT it was the driving force behind my reading obsession. I wanted justice and I wanted him stoned into mush.

The story starts out with three friends (Dee, her boyfriend Luke, and his younger brother, Mike) on the road to a concert in East-of-Nowhere New York when they run out of gas on an abandoned stretch of highway. They spot lights in the distance, and with ice coating the roads and hypothermia knocking on the windows, they decide to investigate the town. Bad idea – didn’t these kids see Cujo?? DON’T LEAVE THE DAMN CAR! It all turns into a real-life Hell, with cult leader Elijah Hawkins filling his role perfectly as the violence-in-the-name-of-god character. His horrifically abused son, Joseph, is also wandering the town with his own agenda.

The characters in this book are what make the story. Hands down, Luke was my favorite (damn you Leaver and Currie!!). His brother Mike is a great, unlikely hero. I loved the brothers and fell for them both quickly. Joseph is brilliantly drawn as a survivor of his father’s wrath, but the reader never knows if he is actually a good guy or a player, and I love that. His broken but tough soul made me want to root for him, but then I questioned his motives constantly.

Elijah – well, I covered my thoughts on him, but Dee, the voice of the story, really needed to die. I kept screaming at her to fight back, beat the piss out of Elijah. Stab him, claw his face off – ANYTHING! I was hoping she would go after him and die in a way fitting of Pulp Fiction, taking Elijah down with her. Seriously . . . if I ever meet her on the street, I may push her out into traffic.

This book is like a train wreck in that you can’t peel your eyes from the carnage even though you know the outcome ain’t gonna be pretty. Which is why it works so flawlessly.

Leaver and Currie did not set out to write a happily-ever-after. They set out to make you totally loathe a character and scream at the pages, which is precisely what this story does.

CREED leaves you haunted . . . and in need of a punching bag. A big one.

I dare you to put it down. A lethal five-stars.