It’s been a while since I last finished a book and realized I still had almost no idea what the story was about. It’s not that the plot of The Reddening was complex or intricate, but rather that it was meandering, boring, and ultimately pointless. I’ve seen a lot of cases of wasted potential over the course of my years reading, and this has to be one of the most egregious.

The Reddening begins with an interesting premise: a cave has been found containing relics from a primeval time, shedding light on the barbaric and grotesque practices of those people who originally settled the region. There is apparently a cult emulating the ritualistic behavior of these primitive people, and the bodies are piling up.

The problem begins with stupid, paper-thin characters. First of all, Kat and Helene are so bland that I kept getting them confused for much of the book. It was only when Helene started mentioning her child every other sentence and Kat fixated on her dead boyfriend that I began to tell them apart. Let’s talk about Kat and Steve for a second. These two are constantly fighting, Steve is flirting with other women in front of her, and Kat constantly thinks about how things with him aren’t serious… and then suddenly she is in love with him. This was so bizarre and, I believe, only happened in attempt to make the readers care about Steve’s grisly death.

Spoiler alert: no one cares about Steve’s grisly death. Or about anything that happens to any characters in this book. Because there’s no reason to. Why did the cult try to abandon Helene at sea? Why not feed her to the Red or whatever they were doing to other people? The idiots on the boat were so worried about leaving marks that could lead back to them, yet they had a sure-fire way of completely disposing of her body. So many things like this make absolutely no sense in this book.

I won’t even get started on how dumb every character must be, unable to put the pieces together that this old hippy is the cult leader. He literally named one of his albums after the Red People. I was constantly rolling my eyes and getting frustrated at how absolutely stupid The Reddening was. And, I’m going to be petty for a moment, but The Reddening is a dumb name. Maybe that should have clued me in.

My major issue with this book is that it’s just so damn boring. Nevill describes everything in excruciating detail, with as many words as he possibly can, at every opportunity. His characters have inner monologues that explain and ponder obvious things over and over again. There are literally multiple chapters about Helene swimming. Swimming! I can’t count the number of times I tuned out and let the narrator become background noise to whatever else I was doing.

And perhaps that’s why I still don’t have a clear picture about what the hell this book is supposed to be about. This cult was selling marijuana while feeding people to this old god thing that lives in the ground? And this cult is running around in broad daylight abducting people and killing them and no one else notices or cares? And there’s apparently a whole crime organization based around this cult and their worship of this creature? I’ll be honest, by the end of the story I had completely lost interest and didn’t care about the characters or the plot at all.

The final nail in the coffin for me was the narration by Conner Goff. It was absolutely terrible. Monotonous, droning, mispronouncing words, accents come and go, etc. Definitely the worst audiobook performance I’ve encountered thus far. Why is this novel that takes place in England and is about two English women narrated by an American man?

Everything about The Reddening, except for perhaps its overall premise, was disappointing and frustrating.