Together We Rot by Skyla Arndt – ARC Review

Title: Together We Rot

Author: Skyla Arndt

Publishing House: Viking Books for Young Readers

Genre: Horror (YA)

Synopsis (from Goodreads): A teen girl looking for the truth about her missing mother forms a reluctant alliance with her former best friend…in exchange for hiding him from his cult-leading family.

Wil Greene’s mom has been missing for over a year, and the police are ready to call the case closed–they claim she skipped town and you can’t find a woman who wants to disappear. But she knows her mom wouldn’t just leave…and she knows the family of her former best friend, Elwood Clarke, has something to do with it.

Elwood has been counting down the days until his 18th birthday–in dread. It marks leaving school and joining his pastor father in dedicating his life to their congregation, the Garden of Adam. But when he comes home after one night of after a final goodbye with his friends, already self-flagellating for the sins of drinking and disobeying his father, he discovers his path is not as virtuous as he thought. He’s not his father’s successor, but his sacrifice. For the woods he’s grown up with are thirsty, and must be paid in blood.

Now on the run from a family that wants him dead, he turns to the only one who will believe him: Wil. Together, they form a reluctant partnership; she’ll help him hide if he helps her find evidence that his family killed her mother. But in the end they dig up more secrets than they bargained for, unraveling decades of dark cult dealings in their town, led by the Clarke family.

And there’s a reason they need Elwood’s blood for their satanic rituals. Something inhuman is growing inside of him. Everywhere he goes, the plants come alive and the forest calls to him, and Wil isn’t sure if she can save the boy she can’t help but love.

Rating: 3/5 stars

Publishing Date: 29^th of August 2023

A huge thank you to NetGalley and Viking Books for Young Readers for providing me with a digital ARC of this book, in exchange for an honest review.
All opinions, however, are completely my own.

 

 

TW (could be spoilery, so in case skip them): body gore, abusing parents, cult, disappeared mother, murder

From this point on this review will be completely spoiler-free

 

“Together We Rot” is a book I was lucky enough to read in advance thanks to the publishing house, and while I enjoyed it still think, even after months I read it, that it could have given me more. I’m totally in the minority here, since this book has such a high rating on Goodreads, but it left me with wanting something more. Let’s talk a bit about it.

The premise of this book was so interesting in my eyes, it is an eerie story following two former best friends in a small town, but something happened between them and now they don’t talk to each other anymore. Wil’s mother has been missing for quite some time, and while the police consider the case closed, she thinks it’s far from it, and she blames Elwood’s family for that. Elwood as in her former best friend.

Elwood, on the other hand, has a very strained relationship with his pastor father, but he still decides, on his 18^th birthday, to join his congregation, the Garden of Adam. This entails no longer having a social life, and dedicating his life to whatever is going on in his father’s church, even if he doesn’t completely understand it. Not that he has a choice. His father can be very violent if he’s being disobeyed.
But what Elwood doesn’t know is that the woods crave blood, and that his role in the congregation is not what it seems. Not sure about what he’s gotten himself into, he has no choice but to run back to Wil, the only one who had always had doubt about his father. He has to run, but at the same time something inside of him is growing, something he can’t escape from…

On paper this book has everything I could possibly want, a small town folkloristic setting, lyrical writing, and what seems to be a lovely former friends to lovers plot. So what actually didn’t quite work for me?
The book is not very long, not even 300 pages, and for this reason I think there isn’t a lot of background for the characters and their motivations. As a story, it is beautiful. The writing is really good, hence the 3 stars. But I would have liked to empathize a bit more with Elwood and Wil. While I understood that what was happening to them was awful, and while I felt for them, I can’t say that these characters will stay with me forever, and I think this is mainly because of what I found to be a lack of characterization and a lack of deeper understanding on my part of their motivations.

One thing I really enjoyed was Wil and Elwood’s former friendship, and how it shattered. I think the author did a really good job of that, and their reconciliation wasn’t fast at all, I was satisfied on that part.
There is a bit grumpy girl, sunshine boy in this book if you like this trope, but just remember it is embedded in a horror story.

Talking about the horror part, this surely focuses mostly on bodily horrors, but it doesn’t shy away from deeper themes such as murder, the disappearance of a parent, on page descriptions of parental violence and abuse, and cults. So, while it is sold as a YA, since the character are teens, I would advise a younger audience (and not only) to read the trigger warnings before picking this book up. This is a general advice I have for this book, but in reality I believe that for every book.

Okay guys, these were my thoughts about “Together We Rot” by Skyla Arndt. If this is something you think could appeal to you, I still recommend picking this up, I think the idea behind the plot is really beautiful, if you like horror novels.

Thanks for reading, talk to you soon,