I had to read The Sacrifice Box for the monthly book club at my local Waterstones. The premise of the book sounded so interesting! I love books that focus on friendship, and I do love a good thriller/horror novel! So this sounded like a perfect read for me.

Sep, Arkle, Mack, Lamb and Hadley: five friends thrown together one hot, sultry summer. When they discover an ancient stone box hidden in the forest, they decide to each make a sacrifice: something special to them, committed to the box for ever. And they make a pact: they will never return to the box at night; they’ll never visit it alone; and they’ll never take back their offerings.

Four years later, the gang have drifted apart. Then a series of strange and terrifying events take place, and Sep and his friends understand that one of them has broken the pact.

As their sacrifices haunt them with increased violence and hunger, they realise that they are not the first children to have found the box in their town’s history. And ultimately, the box may want the greatest sacrifice of all: one of them.

Ok so wow this book was so different to what I was expecting it to be, and I don’t even know whether I mean that in a positive or negative way. For the first 110 pages of the book, I just couldn’t’ get into it; I don’t know what it was about the plot that made me not want to carry on reading it, but it just wasn’t grasping my attention. And then… At about the 100 page mark, there was a walking, talking teddy bear, and for me that was it. I just couldn’t read anymore. I imagined Ted (from the Ted films) and then the teddy bear from that one Supernatural episode mixed together… It was just… not funny… or scary… For me, it came across as well… stupid.

I stopped reading it for about a couple of weeks because I didn’t want to read about some weird teddy bear. But then, I decided that I should probably finish it because I hate DNF’ing books because you never know whether they’re going to get better (or worse).

“Never come to the box alone.
Never open it after dark.
Never take back your sacrifice.”

– Martin Stewart, The Sacrifice Box

So I carried on… and to my surprise, it actually DID get better. The book got a lot more exciting as more action was taking place and there were zombies (?) I’ve put a question mark because I’m not 100% sure that they were even zombies. But basically, birds would die (or people), and then they would come back to life (which is a zombie trait) and it was just strange. Stewart didn’t write that they were specifically zombies, but they definitely came across like that. And zombies DEFINITELY WERE NOT advertised on the blurb. BUT, they weren’t a main part of the story, they come in towards the end of the novel.

Also, I really do not understand how these five people became friends in the first place. There didn’t seem to be any emotional connection between them, they had nothing in common and if anything, they came across as hating each other… Another strange element of the book. And it doesn’t help that I didn’t really have an emotional connection with the characters because we never spent a lot of time with any of the characters (apart from Sep, since he was our main protagonist), so I just didn’t feel anything for them.

Overall, I had quite high expectations of this book because the blurb reminded me of Stranger Things and it sounded like something that I would be interested in. However, it did let me down, hence it being a 3 star book for me. I didn’t love it, and I didn’t hate it. I’m glad I’ve finally read it but I can safely say that I don’t think that I’m going to be re-reading it anytime soon.