Book Review: Into The Mist by Lee Murray

When NZDF Sergeant Taine McKenna and his squad are tasked with escorting a bunch of civilian contractors into Te Urewera National Park, it seems a strange job for the army.
Militant Tūhoe separatists are active in the area, and with its cloying mist and steep ravines, the forest is a treacherous place in winter. Yet nothing has prepared Taine for the true danger that awaits them. Death incarnate.
 
They backtrack toward civilisation, stalked by a prehistoric creature intent on picking them off one by one. With their weapons ineffective, the babysitting job has become a race for survival.
Desperate to bring his charges out alive, Taine draws on ancient tribal wisdom. Will it be enough to stop the nightmare? And when the mist clears, will anyone be left? 

My Review: 
What attracted me to this book was firstly the cover and secondly the idea of there being a scary dinosaur in the forests of New Zealand, a location we rarely see in horror reads. I was really excited to read this one.

A high number of missing people have been reported in the national park and a military team that was sent in to find out what happened has also disappeared. Major Arnold decides to put a second team led by Taine McKenna into the park to find out what happened to the other team and solve the mystery. They go undercover as a military security team for an official scientific expedition to find gold in the area and try to use the opportunity to scout around for any sign of the missing people. However what they find instead is a legendary monster that has been on a killing spree and is determined to add everyone on the expedition to the lunch menu.

The actual main story was interesting. The monster is totally lethal and deadly so just being a few steps adrift of the group can be enough to cost you your life. The monster is scary and the attack scenes are pretty brutal so I liked those parts of it. The expedition does seem to go round in circles though as the team try to trek out after their first encounters with the monsters and then trek back in again, then try to get out again. I would expect a military team to decide to get everyone out immediatly and if two people are idiot enough to go back to try and set a trap for the beast, surely the military has a duty to get the others to safety first and then consider going to fetch the idiots? I found it a very strange decision to take everyone back into the danger zone they were just getting out of.

I'm not much for mystical plot threads about local legends in my horror books so I did struggle a bit with that in this book. A local man is visited by an image of the beast which makes him block the road into the national park and try to stop people going into the danger zone, knowing that a monster is waiting for them. But we then get dream sequences where he goes out walking and meets and talks to the monster and I felt that these additions kept slowing down the plot. I sort of lost interest in this dreamwalker stuff every time it appeared.

I was also a bit disinterested in the conspiracy plots which for me felt a bit half hearted. We have the story of how the gold sample was planted to make everyone think the land is gold rich and the person putting together the survey team was then blackmailed into adding someone to the team but I'm not really clear on the purpose of all this. Someone from Geotech also persuades someone to be a front for their company based on reports of what is in the jungle but again it was all a bit vague as to why this was going on. Add in the militant young locals who are prepared to kill the people on the expedition as they don't want outsiders in their forest despite elders giving permission, and some jungle camp getting attacked and I felt a good horror plot descended into a bit of a mess. I just didn't feel that all this extra stuff added anything to the story and it just slowed things down too much. 

Overall, I didn't love this book. I did enjoy the monster bits but not much else about it really appealed to me I'm afraid. I finished it because I needed it for my World Reads challenge but I did consider DNFing it at one point. I decided not to read the sequel. For me it just didn't quite deliver what I was hoping for and just wasn't my thing.

Read January 2019
2.5 stars.