Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not impact my rating or review.
Honestly, this had a really cool premise and I found myself really into it at a certain point, but that just fizzled. I think that the book was just too short in the end and it felt rushed at times and there’s no real resolution. You can just ask yourself what do you think happens next since it’s not spelled out one way or the other. I also think though that the book switching between so many POVs also hurt it. I think if Armstrong had fleshed out everyone a bit more, it would have hung together much more tightly. Also as a reader, you start to realize what is going on way sooner than the characters in the book do, but I wish that we had some clean resolutions to some of the things, it just felt like people were dying, being eaten by mysterious monsters, and getting constant riddles.
Dive Bar at the End of the Road starts off with 30 something year old Ellie driving home to her parent’s house in the middle of the night. She realizes though that something odd is going on and she should have been home hours earlier. Ellie though ends up in an accident when she ends up hitting a woman who appears out of nowhere. Ellie eventually gets out of her car and then ends up causing another accident when a man named Henry comes along and ends up hitting the back of her wrecked car. When the two of them make off to find help, they realize that something seems to be watching them and the moon looks weird. And then they come upon a dive bar that though it looks decrepit outside, is warm inside with a bartender and a woman that doesn’t want to talk to them. When more and more people start having accidents (Noemi, Caleb, Edgar, and Raymond) they all start to realize that someone or something is keeping them there.
I wish we had spent more time with the characters. We get enough bare bones about them all and of course the reveal of why/how they are there, but that was it. This was marketed as Final Destination meets Cabin at the End of the World and I went….um okay, but how? I say this as a fan of the Final Destination movies and a reader of the Cabin at the End of the World. Sometimes I have to wonder who comes up with book blurbs and did said person actually read or watch said movie/books that they likening something else to.
The flow of the book just doesn’t get going unfortunately. I think jumping back and forth between characters, though Armstrong tends to focus mostly on Ellie and Henry just made the book weaker after a while. I just felt at times I was reading a screenplay or watching a mini-series since we just seemed to be lurching from scene to scene.
The setting of the place that the characters are in feels like a really bad horror novel. You have the dive bar, wrecked cars, and forests where something dark and ugly seems to be hiding.
The ending didn’t feel satisfying to me. As I said above, since the author left it pretty open ended, you can guess one of two things happens.
