A Family Of Violence by Jon Athan

This is actually a pretty decent book but it is more a psychological tale than a horrific one.  It is definitely a gory one and the descriptions of murder are lavish in their descriptions of blade and boot.  If you are of a squeamish disposition this is not the book for you, I can promise you that.

This short tale follows Stanley King and his gradual dissolution from bullied school boy to a member of a gleefully psychotic family.  Ed and Kat believe that you should do what you want, when you want and that only they are free; free from the rules of society, free to kill.  We get to watch the descent from relatively normal teen to cold blooded killer.  The descriptions of his mental deterioration are handled well and you can feel his warring emotions of terror at his acts and glee at the same.

What spoils this book is the reliance on certain words and phrases; I am pretty sure Mr Athan has just come across the word crepitation in his thesaurus and loved it - goodness knows it appears often enough in the book.  In fact it appears so often that loud tuts would be heard from my end of the couch roughly every 5 pages when it made it's umpteenth appearance.  Couple this with the overuse of adjectives (we get that Stanley is a wicked/deviant youth/teenager), you do not need to stress how poor this boy's psyche is - we get that from his actions.

The plot is barely there but it does move very rapidly from gorefest to cannibalism to bed wetting and back.  Although it was an enjoyable read of the the genre it smacked of being thrown together and tossed out there rather than crafted.  Hence the multiple repetitions of reactions (mentioned by other reviewers) and poorly constructed sentences.  However, if this is a genre that you enjoy then this is a good read and is short enough that you stay just on the right side of wanting to throttle the author and his style.

**Review originally published February 3rd, 2018**