The Bloody Brick Road: A Wizard of Oz Retelling by Maude Royer
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I feel robbed. I wanted a bloody and brutal Wizard of Oz retelling; thinking Slasher Horror, or something equally exciting and got nothing of the sort.
Giving a character the name Dorothy and incorporating red shoes, does not a Wizard of Oz retelling make. At the end of the day, this story felt like it was searching for an identity and required further edits.
The 1st-sentence of the Publisher’s synopsis I read states, ‘In this wildly creative, horror-soaked reimagining of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, nothing is as it seems in Dorothy’s dystopian nightmare.‘
Whoever wrote this, you lie. 1. This isn’t wildly-creative. 2. This is hardly a reimagining of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. 3. This doesn’t feel dystopian at all.
Things you got right: 1. It’s a nightmare.
I’m not going to drag this out. It wasn’t for me. I’m sad I wasted 6-hours reading it, but am happy to be moving on. If it was going to go the Extreme Horror route, which it seemed it wanted to take due to the graphic fetish elements, it needed to lean much further in to get there.
The sad part is, there were inklings of a solid Serial Killer Police Procedural in here, but mashing it together with the other elements, it just didn’t work. It needed to be one or the other, or perhaps better blended than it was.
Overall, a very uneven read, nothing like what I was pitched. The dialogue was forced and laughable, and the graphic sexual elements felt absolutely ridiculous in this story.
Thank you to Gallery Books for the copy.