by Ellen Reese  29 chapters  Completed

Folks, when I read a scary tale or a thriller, I rarely stay interested, well, because it's not!  But Ellen Reese does NOT disappoint.  Get ready to immerse yourself into her very dark world.  Monsters?  Yes.  Gross stuff?  Check.  Lots of blood and gore and torture?  Yeppers.  Very graphic on the sound effects when a monster was eating Angel's dad, though I was surprised there was no sounds about the bones crunching, so I guess all the bones were intact.

I could go into details about the monsters, but I don't want to completely give this book away.  Though be warned:  mannequins will never appear the same again.  What this book really makes you want to explore though, is the monster inside of you.  That darkness that we all hide.  There are some "shadow people" that pop up here and there, and it brings up the darkest part of our nature.  Not so much with Axel.  His "shadow" appeared to be his saving grace, even though his own mother turned him into a monster. 

Okay, so I just gave something away.  But I'm only doing that because the story itself only hints at at, and not a lot of people have commented that they figured it out.  READERS BE WARNED:  Axel had to go through some terrible abuse as a child, so all the things that he later did, they were bad, but unfortunately not uncommon.  But there is something that I did not bring up in the comments, but was always in the back of my mind.  You see, my spouse and I, we both knew a guy.  I am not going to go into detail about it.  I will only leave it at there is a reason that he has issues with clowns....  What is absolutely terrible to know though, is that this woman left her child with this man, and she KNEW that he was the way he was.  We don't actually meet the mom in this story, but I can't help but wonder if she knew.  She did after all change her own son into this monster, or as shadow Axel described it, "reborn."  I wouldn't put it past her if she was aware of all the animals he was torturing as well.

The story itself ends with Angel having to come to terms with how selfish he is, even if he did manage to grow up inside at least a little bit.  But if Ellen were to ever make a sequel to this story, I am already be sold.  There are so many things that were left undone with Axel, even if Angel did manage to save Averel.  There is just one thing I did not mention about Angel:  intersex.  And this plays a very integral part of this story.  It's what he hates the most about himself, and the monsters that go after him, there is something about them that always screams out this part of Angel.  The one thing that gets to me though, is the fact that it's never mentioned in this story.  I'm going to give you a name:  Baphomet  The Goat head.  Both male and female.  The lower regions of a male.  The soft mounds of a female.  Just like Axel.  And I wonder, if the mother was evil enough to harm her first born, could she have done some kind of ritual to make Axel turn out physically the way he did?  And finally, one more question:  Did Angel actually get to save his sister, or did he appear too late?  He did after all appear when they had already had her tied up and changed into a virginal white shift.  An innocent sacrifice maybe?

Either way, this tale is one of those that brings of the dark nature of human beings in general, and only after we bring these dark things to the light, will we be able to do anything to change any of it.  The things that Angel fears about his "condition," are all too true.  Maybe one day we can overcome this too.