The Visitor

Title: The Visitor
Author: Sergio Gomez
First Published: December 15, 2020
Publisher: Self-Published
Pages: 98
Genre: Horror
Format: Ebook
Source: Kindle Unlimited
Rating:


Synopsis:

On Christmas, during one of the worst snowstorms Indiana has ever seen, five strangers are forced to take shelter inside of a roadside diner. As the night progresses, the snowfall shows no signs of relenting, ice begins to build up on the roads, and the temperature seems to be dropping by the hour. But the worst has nothing to do with the weather, and everything to do with the sixth visitor coming to the diner. The jolliest time of the year quickly turns bloody as the diners find themselves fighting for their lives. This Christmas won’t just be white. It’ll be red, too.

Buy the Book: Amazon

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Review

A Christmas bloodbath with an alien visitor during a snowstorm sounded like the perfect holiday horror, but I ended up a little bummed out about this one. I had been excited to try out a Sergio Gomez book after seeing a lot of high praise for his previous work and this prompted me to pick this book up. The premise is good and I enjoyed the story set up in the first quarter of the book with a cozy setting and decent characters.

I enjoy alien horror and I am not at all averse to gore and violence, and you get a good amount in this novella. Despite this, I found myself eventually getting a little bored the longer that I read and the big alien reveal was lackluster. The reasoning for the hunt was also a little silly and didn’t make much sense, but I could forgive it that this book is very much a B-movie kind of splatterfest. It’s a fast-paced story and all of the tension is lost after the first casualty. It just didn’t end up being for me.

I also found a number of grammatical errors, clipped sentences, and repetition despite the short page count. This story definitely needed one last editing sweep to clean up the text. There were also a few odd things about the story setting that made me pause and check if I was just remembering wrong. The story is set in Indiana near mountains, but there are no mountains in Indiana, it is actually a relatively flat state. The diner that the book is set in is stated to be a converted trailer-style diner which is a tight space, and it is described this way in the beginning, but later is described as having extra doors that lead to a separate kitchen and basement that didn’t quite fit. This book would have benefited from an editor to catch these inconsistencies.

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