A ‘Did Not Finish’… ‘The Spread, Book 2: The Village’ Iain Rob Wright


A lot of the time, you can see a ‘Did Not Finish’ coming at you from a distance. A book clearly isn’t working for you, whatever the reason, and you know, at the back of your mind, that eventually you will stop reading and that will be that. Sometimes though, a ‘Did Not Finish’ can creep up on you when you are least expecting it and you suddenly realise that the last time you picked a particular book up was the last time you’d ever pick it up. That’s what happened to me with ‘The Spread, Book 2’…

Ryan and Aaron have escaped the cottage by the hill and finally made it to the village where they hope to find safety, but the threat of the quickly spreading fungus is only growing worse, and not everyone in the village welcomes strangers. It's time to meet the locals..

I’ve gone back and read my post on Book 1 of ‘The Spread’ and I’m a little bit embarrassed now as I was all full of ‘I’m definitely going to read the whole series etc etc’ and here I am, effectively dropping out of the whole series part of the way through Book 2. Oh well, that’s the way it goes sometimes 😊 For me, while ‘The Village’ was more of what made ‘The Spread’ so much fun (fungal body horror, to put it bluntly), where it fell down for me was that the new supporting cast didn’t have quite enough about them for me to really care whether they made it through or not. And that isn’t cool when the whole point of the book is that they’re effectively under siege and there’s a big question over whether they’ll make it through or not. Your mileage will inevitably vary and I certainly wouldn’t tell you not to pick up this book based on my experience, there is still a lot here to recommend it. Just not for me though. I put this book down, a few weeks ago, and today I remembered I’d left things hanging but wasn’t bothered enough to go back to it and keep going. I wouldn’t blame the book though, sometimes things just don’t click and all you can do is go and find another book and keep reading 😉

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