The Sacrifice by Rin Chupeco

 

THE SACRIFICE was a total impulse-buy for me, considering I wasn't too fond of the last book I read by this author. But everything about this book sounded so awesome that I wanted to give it a try anyway. A haunted island in the Philippines where a racially insensitive American film crew awakens something terrible while trying to film a ghost hunting show? And a nonbinary lead?

Yeah, there's no way we're saying no to any of that.

And I was so right, by the way. This was fun. Creepy and a little gory, but not more than I, a wuss, could handle. I forgot to mute my phone and when the notification alarm went off while I was in the middle of one of the scarier scenes, I literally JUMPED (and I was holding a water glass, so guess who got soaked???). The anticolonialist message pours from the pages, couched in rage, which serve as a nice counterpoint to the dry irony of the narrator, Alon, who knows that the interlopers are making a terrible mistake, but also knows that they won't heed their warnings because of their arrogance.

My only qualm is that the pacing felt uneven. There were a lot of slow moments. I get that slower beats are a necessity to allow readers to absorb the horror, which was quite well done, but I did find myself losing interest at some parts in the third act. The villain(s) were also kind of caricatures of evil, but because this feels like an homage to classic horror, I feel like that actually worked here. At many points, this feels like a satire of monster horror movies, and I kind of loved that.

Definitely read this if you like folk horror and East Asian settings!

3 to 3.5 stars