[Review] Reincursion

Ryan Harding and Jason Taverner 

August 2021

Death’s Head Press

5/5 Stars

 ATTENTION: The trigger warnings at the bottom contain spoilers.

This was the first book in a long time that gave me nightmares, I read it before bed every day (granted, not the best choice of time) and because of it I went to bed with my heart still racing and my body tense because of the novel’s pace. It filled my dreams with chase scenes, abhorrent dread, and the certainty that I would be murdered in the most gruesome way if I stopped running. As I’ve mentioned in a previous review, I’m a squeamish person when it comes to gore and there is no better word than gory to describe Reincursion. Because of that, I was uncomfortable for most of the book, but it was the best kind of uncomfortable. It was the way I wish I felt while watching horror movies. However, for full disclosure, I only skimmed over the death descriptions and if you’re squeamish like me, you can adopt this same strategy while reading.

This truly read like an action-packed slasher movie and I loved how the authors constructed elaborate lore around the killer, aka Agent Orange, and established from the get-go that, just as in the movies, he was almost unkillable. His haunting ground, aka the Kill Zone, and how it came to be is one of the most interesting backstories I’ve encountered so far and I’d love to read a novel dedicated solely to his first slayings. The meta imagery goes a step further and adds a very nice touch: inside the novel’s universe, the characters mention several times a slasher movie franchise that’s based on Agent Orange’s killings.

I only had one issue with the novel, sadly it’s an issue that I (and all women) have faced many times before: the constant and needless sexualization of female characters. Bryce and Evan have several inner monologues full of descriptions of how sexy and desirable Erika and Billie are and how much they wish to have sex with them. Funnily enough, the women never think of the men as sexual objects, or extensively describe how lustful parts of the men’s bodies make them feel during the chapters that follow their POV. While Evan has redeeming qualities and an actual personality, Bryce is one of the most unbearable characters to ever exist. Although Bryce was written, intending to be rather pathetic and unlikeable, the authors were a little heavy-handed and made him so unpleasant that it almost made me give up on the book altogether.

Once you get past Bryce’s and Evan’s first chapters, the book improves significantly; the pace picks up once they all get inside the Kill Zone and the tension doesn’t let up until the very last page. Considering that the novel is over 300 pages, that is a huge feat by the authors, they keep the narrative dynamic and interesting without ever letting up on the tension. The characters were also constructed well and have distinct personalities and voices, which is another difficult task when there are nine different main POVs and follows 13 people. They also have complex backstories that provide the reader with a window to each person’s motives to risk their lives by entering the Kill Zone. Because of that, I could connect with them and root for their survival and made the deaths even harder to read. Oh, how I would pay good money to see this book adapted into a slasher movie and be able to undergo even more anxiety and repulsion at the hands of Agent Orange.

  TW: extreme gore, body horror, child death, injury detail, death