Your Shadow Half Remains by Sunny Moraine

Source: NetGalley – So many thanks to the publisher!
TL;DR: If you’ve a fear of being alone, have intense feelings of the pandemic or enjoy more topical mental hellscape type of horrors – this is for you. If you’re here for the creepy, the supernatural, or any type of humor or human endurance? Pass on this.

Plot: A slow fall into madness due to being locked away by a pandemic. It was… not a fun read. And not in the fun ‘not fun’ way either.
Characters: Didn’t really get much out of them to be honest. I didn’t end up attached or liking either one. Our main PoV is unwell, and the secondary character is pretty much just a shadow.
Setting: The characters are very limited to one of three places, a lake shore, and one of two similar houses. The locations are well drawn, and it does feel claustrophobic.
Horror: This is very ‘slow decent into madness’ type of horror. There is nothing supernatural here. More just one lady loosing herself slowly.

Thoughts:

Your Shadow Half Remains reminds me a lot of Sister, Maiden, Monster which I read last year (and honestly deeply disliked as well). It has a very modern, relevant to our times theme and keeps us trapped in the minds of clearly unwell people during these times. This is a very pandemic centered novel, focusing on the mind of a women trapped in a pandemic, this one where you cannot look someone in the eye without being instantly driven to homicide.

Not only is it intensely brutal (for the shock factor of it all), it also looks at the way in which we become numb to the atrocities around us during extreme times. This was an interesting conversation but the slow decent into madness we experience with Riley was very… well cringe for me.

If you’ve a fear of being alone, have intense feelings of the pandemic or enjoy more topical mental hellscape type of horrors – this is for you. If you’re here for the creepy, the supernatural, or any type of humor or human endurance? Pass on this.

Please keep in mind this is very intense. A lot of gore, themes of a possible stalker, suicide aplenty, animal death/violence, death of a parent, an attempted sexual assault in the past, and possibly more that I missed

2 Unneeded Crow Murders out of 5 (the hell was that scene?)