Review: An Entertaining Psychological Thriller
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 09 1, 2013
I had previously read this author's bookPLAZAwhich I really enjoyed, so I was eager to check out MELT. One thing that impressed me was this this book is totally different than PLAZA. Shane Brown is apparently one of those genre-crossing type of authors and I appreciate when authors try their hand at other genres and don't just stick to their comfort zone.I found MELT to be pretty gripping (I basically read through the whole thing in one day.) Strangers wake up in a big room in the center of which lies a pretty big ice cube. Frozen in the ice are items, some of which may be clues to escaping this peculiar situation. People will be tested, even pushed beyond their limits, as they try to solve the mystery of the ice... before it's too late.Its easy to draw parallels between this story and movies like The Cube and SAW however this story offers a new twist on the whole "strangers wake up captive in a room together" tale. (Just to be clear, although there are some very graphic scenes, MELT is not a gore-fest like SAW, not does it have the open ended ending that The Cube has.) The ice is a nice twist on this idea.There were a few things I didn't like about the story. I will try to avoid spoiling anything, but if you're thinking about getting this book, you might want to skip the rest of this review, and just go and enjoy the story. Trust me.I found the explanation for all of these events a bit unsatisfying. It just seemed implausible and unlikely. Then I realized that the whole story is implausible, and that the author actually came up with a better ending than I could have. Best I could think of was that some psycho had caught these people and wanted to torture them for his own gratification, like SAW. Thankfully Shane Brown has a better imagination than that, and has come up with an explanation that is interesting and creative, even if it is a little far fetched. Honestly, the more I think about it, Mr. Brown has really done the best possible job at explaining it all, and thankfully he gives a definitive reason for the events rather than leaving it open ended (which would have sucked.)By the way, in the above paragraph I've been referring to the explanation, not the ending. The ending itself is the bomb. Seriously awesome. It left me feeling good about reading the story and did a good job of tying up loose ends.Highly recommended to fans of the captive/horror genre and fans of character-driven psychological thrillers.