Misery Plaza is what I would imagine the end result to look like if Alien, Jeepers Creepers, and Red Dead Redemption had a baby.

And I know what you’re probably thinking, how do you make a book about aliens in the Wild West anything but cheesy? But somehow J.J. Alo did it!

This was a wild ride from start to finish. An epic western sci fi horror, the world and character building in the first half of the book is rich and expansive. Then, the action kicks in and it just doesn’t stop. This was so different to anything I’ve ever read before, and I’m sure anything I will ever read again.

Misery plaza is first and foremost NOT a southern New England horror novel. It’s a western with heavy sci-fi elements in the later parts of the book.

It’s sprawling and emissive and if you like loosing your self in a book this is a good one to get lost in.

The word is heavily populated and the characters seem pretty tangible even if we only see them for a brief time.

The book strikes a fairly balance of being written “of its time” ie full of hate speech but with especially race issues it tries to at least condemn some of the racist ideology of the time. It’s not perfect or comfortable but I appreciated the attempt.

It’s long, and tbh the real first time we really get to the interest of the book is around 40% in.

I picked this book up because of its horror classification but honestly while it dabbles in horror it’s far more western and sci-fi. If I had known that going in I probably would have enjoyed it more

The horror aspect is a little lack luster and honestly at this length I’m simply not sure the payoff was worth this.

There’s a child murder sub plot and it is interesting but in competes with the main plot in an unsatisfying way. It honestly could have been a fun main plot in its own but was just one to many ideas as it was.

I think if this pool had been about 150 pages shorter it would have worked a lot better for me.

Also there are some INTERESTING comments about the main characters dead wife. Truly some choices there

I did find out conversation hearts are like supper old and that’s FUN