It's taken me a while to write a review for this book as I wasn't sure how I felt about it - I really enjoyed the premise and was greeted with an intense horror novel, something I personally really like. The downside was the writing was a little long winded - I found myself drifting during portions of the novel! Apart from that I would read other novels by this author so would be intrigued to see what he comes up with next.

I received this ARC from Net gallery for review and I was excited to read this. I found this to be an excellent book. I however found it to be very disturbing, very different and horrifying. It is brutal, not for the easily disturbed, or squeamish. Depicts the life of child soldiers who are forced to commit atrocities. Punished and threatened with death for the slightest infractions. What makes this book so haunting is the fact these atrocities are all to real in some places in this world. An excellent book! This author told a truly haunting story! I will definitely recommend this book

This isn’t your average horror story, this is a brutally raw and graphic but wonderfully told. The characters in this novel are well developed and you feel like you’re in their mind, you’re with them. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I read this but I did find this to be well written and couldn’t stop reading.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. This was a rough book to read. I enjoyed it, but stuck with me in a hard way. Horror at it's best.

Who says there's nothing new in Horror Fiction?

Imagine if the novel Beasts of No Nation had been written as a horror novel featuring H.P. Lovecraft's Elder Gods and you may get a hint of how unique this tale is. I found myself rooting for young African guerrillas in the Liberian Civil War with names like Corpse Eater, Marlboro Man and Puppy Killer. Artyom Dereschuk has a spot on my must-read list. Next up on my TBR pile is his debut novel Master of the Forest.

“He was supposed to live to be a hundred years old and die in his sleep.”

Hate the Sin is my second go around with Dereschuk, after reading Master of the Forest last year. As I said then, I am a massive, massive fan of all things set in Russia/Siberian etc. Growing up the vast wilderness of that area of the world always intrigued me and set my imagination running. Where I grew up shared many similarities to that area, so naturally I get drawn too it.
Where Master of the Forest started a bit slow before completely ramping things up, Hate the Sin is the opposite. Set during a real war and featuring the horrific act of child army conscription, Dereschuk is able to immediately pull the reader in with the sad nature of just what is happening. Making kids into killing machines is a brutal topic and to show the extent of the “soldier” aspect and the dehumanizing the kid’s experience, none of them are called by their real names, all have chosen war names. Names such as Desecrator, Pussy Slayer and Tsetse.
The story turns into a supernatural tale once General Malaria orders his troop onto a nearby village and they kill one of the spiritual women. Soon after creatures descend and kill some of the troop. It’s at this point the story heads subterranean.
Where Master of the Forest became a tale of survivor, Hate the Sin unfortunately devolves into a ‘more of the same’ story with many chapters feeling repetitive of prior chapters and the story not being furthered by their inclusion. The biggest miss for me though, was the story falling into the “there’s always a bigger monster” trope. Dereschuk had created some genuinely creepy monsters, but then the story continued to escalate.
I did enjoy the finale/resolution at the end. It gave some great closure and harkened back to the horrors of war and the lingering hurt and pain that soldiers deal with, more so it would appear when those soldiers were just children.
I think this book will appeal to many horror readers, me personally – it felt lacking in areas and padded in others. I made a comment in my Masters review that a lot of the story felt like it had been written and then translated through Google translate. There was no issue with any of that here, which was great to see!
Definitely check this story out if you enjoy war horror stories and subterranean beasties. I just wish it had pumped the brakes a number of times and focused on a more cohesive story.

** This review will feature on Kendall Reviews **

I wanted to like ‘Hate the Sin’, and for the first quarter or so I did, but after that I felt my interest waning and by the end, I was really struggling with it. That’s a shame, because author Artyom Dereschuk clearly has some talent, and parts of the book are gripping and horrifying.
The premise is immediately appealing and attention grabbing. A group of boy soldiers in war-torn Liberia battle against bloodthirsty supernatural demons. The horror elements kick in early on and are shocking, creepy and exciting at first. The plot becomes one of survival, with the boys and their warlord leader fighting to understand and escape the creatures.
The problem with this kind of chase narrative is that it can become repetitive, and it does here. After a while scenes and characters blurred together and I found myself skim reading. So much so in fact that when my Kindle glitched at one point and took my back a few dozen pages it took me a while to realise.
Part of the issue was that I had trouble distinguishing the various boys in the troop. They have limited back stories and never really came to life for me as characters. Many of the horror scenes are well written, with the creatures and the violence they inflict skilfully described. Unfortunately, when you don’t care about the people being stalked too much, things tend to lose their impact.
This being a book about boy soldiers in war torn Liberia, Dereschuk has a go at throwing in some political commentary. I’m not sure he says anything terribly new, although I did like the ending, where certain characters are called to account for their actions.
I feel like I’m being a little hard on this book, but it just didn’t grab me in the way I expected it to. Maybe it’s just me though, so if you like the premise you might get on better with it than I did.

The frantic aspect of the novel is the reality it carries; honestly brutal and brutally honest, Dereschuk's "Hate the sin" is violent, moving and purely compelling, with fleshed-out characters and engaging writing style.

I don’t know what horrified me most about this story, the awful but probably accurate portrayal of the child soldiers that sadly barely makes even a footnote in the newspapers anymore or the story itself, it’s a powerful story that is well worth reading