The author provided this book to me in exchange for an honest review.

My Sister and I is a psychological dark twisted tale of an abusive father who wants to toughen up his two young daughters. Both daughters are twins and one is almost as twisted as the father, but the other one is more timid. To give the twins a challenge beyond what young daughters normally experience, the father takes them out into the wilds of the Scottish Highlands and leaves them out there to fend for themselves.

What the twins go through on their twisted adventure leaves a trail of gore and unspeakable acts of horror out in the wilds as they try to impress their father that they are capable of handling themselves in dire situations.

The book was a little drawn out for me as there was so much detail in what the sisters were doing and how they were doing it that I had a hard time getting through the book. It was a good book, but not enough to give it anything beyond three stars. ( )

I'm always willing to read a new Sean-Paul Thomas book because he always surprises me as to where the tale will go next. Or even which genre. Sometimes the books are light and sometimes they're pitch black.

This one is like the struggling bright lights of two barely-teen sisters under the insane yoke of an uber survivalist dad who pretty much puts them through all kinds of paces... that steadily get worse and worse.

At its core it's horror, but it's far from being on the lighter side of horror. It pushes you deeper and deeper into worst-nightmare territories and makes you want to survive despite all odds. Even your ideas about what constitutes right are utterly twisted by the journey. Make no mistake, the novel is carried by the heart of the characters, through the sick and the depraved to the shining little core of hope that is sisterhood.

Of course, it eventually turns into a roadtrip tale of hell.

Truly delicious. ( )

I am giving this a top star rating because it is engaging, well-composed and an undeniably excellent example of its type; and that’s the criteria I use for scoring good books. This review will make it pretty clear though that I don’t like the genre and would be much happier if I hadn’t read it. If you enjoy unapologetic horror of physicality and the mind, this has my full recommendation. If not, run.

I had to question why I was reading this novel as firstly I’m a sci-fi reviewer and this is very firmly at the sickening dead centre of the horror category and secondly I’ve never been able to fully recover from my own experience of being trapped in a room and hurt. Well, I know the answer to part one is that Sean-Paul Thomas’s last book (The Old Man and the Princess) had a science fiction metaphor element and got a good review from me, so when the author asked if I was interested in reading his latest work I said “sure, why not?” It wasn’t more of the same. I don’t feel content or even emotionally stable after finishing this. It is shocking horror, gruesome and uncharismatic to the level where two of the characters have diverged so far that they have no place in the human race.

It also has these moments where things are calm and people are civilised, then the next intention is revealed and something drops in the pit of your stomach like the floor’s been taken out from under you. These are the lead character’s little tests. To avoid spoilers, the analogy would be that scene in the Luc Besson film Nikita where the suave guy appears holding a cocktail dress, takes his trainee agent to a restaurant on her birthday, orders the meal, hands her a gift-wrapped present, she opens it with her big, starry eyes full of romantic possibilities and he tells her it’s a gun and to shoot the customer sitting behind him. That’s a film in which people’s demises are simple and clean. In this book, everything’s a bludgeoning struggle of incomprehension.

If you were in fear for your life, highly vulnerable and a policeman arrived, you’d be so thankful, wouldn’t you? Well, this book doesn’t work like that. The emotional pit-falls and wrenches that this author sets up are palpable, the sure sign of the writer being an expert at what he does. The ideas come from a very dark place though, a heady mix of grim and imaginative that makes you queasy like a dollop of blood ice-cream. The suggestion that this behaviour is multi-generational is even more horrifying, an echo of the real historical person Sawney Bean and his shocking family nest of cannibals.

This is dark stuff, trying and succeeding at being real, gritty and twisted. I hope the author is able to step back from this and leave it in the realm of imaginary fiction because if anyone reads his book and is tempted to play any of it out (like they did with The Diceman, by Luke Reinhart) then society has a problem. It brings a pressure on the psyche, not fear as such but a questioning of how something this awful could ever exist in our world – but of course we know monsters (all the real monsters are human) are out there and do get away with their unholy activities for decades. The murderous human mind is a difficult opponent because it can cover up, deceive and hide in plain sight. I’m unsure if it’s true but I heard somewhere that psychopaths have either very low IQs or exceptionally high IQs, both thinking humans are just moving objects, the more intelligent examples only being caught when they secretly want to be caught. Lovely.

Sean-Paul Thomas is clearly an impressive writer and I can see he has what it takes to become mainstream famous. He can write a story that manipulates the emotions and genuinely upsets in a realistic way, where the reader knows a lot of it is genuinely, dirty finger nails, possible (if rare, thankfully). Perhaps it wouldn’t all happen at once or come from the same source and the police would be down on it like a ton of bricks, but fiction does allow events to be concentrated for sustained impact.

Setting this tale in Scotland and drawing upon the glorifying mythos of bone-skulled Glaswegian fighting men is another master-stroke because, again, it’s one place on Earth where the mutilating barbaric attitude would not be out of kilter. I’m not sure that nutters like this exist in Scotland now, but they certainly did in the last century. The huge lesson for me is, in future, I must check the synopsis before I accept any more books for review. The cover image should pretty quickly sort out the kind of people who will like this story versus the wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous wee beasties like me. I found the story unsettling, I was shocked at times and felt anxiety throughout. As imparting those emotions is the entire point of a horror novel, I can’t see anything incorrect to criticise in this, so have been cornered by my own stupid rulebook. ( )