�Day or night, dead was dead.� Deep in the heart of Appalachia, stands a crooked farmhouse miles from any road. The Morrows keep to themselves, and it�s served them well so far. When girls go missing off the side...

�Day or night, dead was dead.�

Deep in the heart of Appalachia, stands a crooked farmhouse miles from any road. The Morrows keep to themselves, and it�s served them well so far. When girls go missing off the side of the highway, the cops don�t knock on their door. Which is a good thing, seeing as to what�s buried in the Morrows� backyard. But nineteen-year-old Michael Morrow isn�t like the rest of his family. He doesn�t take pleasure in the screams that echo through the trees. Michael pines for normalcy, and he�s sure that someday he�ll see the world beyond West Virginia. When he meets Alice, a pretty girl working at a record shop in the small nearby town of Dahlia, he�s immediately smitten. For a moment, he nearly forgets about the monster he�s become. But his brother, Rebel, is all too eager to remind Michael of his place�

Well, I was not sure what to expect with this one. It was a different style writing that I have not read before. This is an incredibly dark story about a terrible family who does some terrible things. There is some gruesome situations with plenty of harm to women and animals. The novel reads like a slow burning character study, focusing on the interactions within this dysfunctional family. I never became fully immersed in the narrative, but readers with more interest in the southern rural stories may enjoy this one more than I did. While I enjoy reading dark stories, this novel demonstrated that simply containing �disturbing subject matter� is not enough to hook me into a narrative. I�m not generally a squeamish reader, but parts of Brother had me cringing in my chair.

I gave this novel a 3.5 star rating. Although the story was initially a little slow, it did get better and have quite a number of plot twists along the way, so I�d say it was a pretty good read. It�s almost as if Ahlborn had a brainstorming session to think up the worst possible actions humans can commit and started tying them into the plot. And she really took it far. Even I got a goosebumps.

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