Book Review: The Prey by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

I had stopped watching horror movies because it doesn’t make sense to jump out of my own skin for entertainment. So when I picked up ‘The Prey’ to read, I had assumed a horror book could not, and should not have the same effect on me as a horror movie.

But alas, I was wrong!

My imagination conjured up the images I could not see on screen, and I had to check to see if my front door was locked twice or thrice during the night. Yeah, I read it during the night and I was home alone. Needless to say, I decided to read till daylight before sleeping.

The story’s location was in the winter period in Hofn, a town in Iceland. Now imagine the characters of the book as seeds of green creeping plants, that sprout out of the ground in different spots from the same white farmland. As the plants grow, they slowly begin to entwine around each other, and as they become one, the colour slowly turns from green to a hideous white nightmare.

As the story unfolds, every character in the book is connected in one form or the other, and decisions made or unmade, come back to haunt them. And as expected, there was no happy ending, or maybe, we just would never know if Karma went full circle.

I think the sobering, scary part is not knowing or remembering the role we played in the ‘our’ past.

So I guess it’s good to say….Luke 23:34.

Signed

Olumide Holloway (King Olulu).