Little Heaven" is the story of three mercenaries hired by a woman to go to an isolated religious community to find her nephew, who has been taken there by his father - and hopefully, get him out. If the story had been written in a more "streamlined" way, with bits about the characters past somehow interspersed throughout the story without having the reader virtually stop the action to read about, this story could have been a much more engaging read overall. A trio of mercenaries are hired by a woman to simply go to a religious group living in the middle of nowhere to check on her nephew. Amos Flesher turned out about as horribly manipulative and sadistic as I expected, but he worked well because he was part of a larger story, rather than driving villainous presence.

Her name is Ellen and she wants to hire him, to track down her nephew who has been trundled off to some religious cult in the outback of nowhere, New Mexico.Edit: apologies for the semi-ironic request for spoiler-free insight, while dropping a spoiler myself! Micah, Ebenezer, and Minerva are the tough-as-nails sort, killers and bounty hunters with checkered pasts. They are surrounded by woods and ever in the shadow of a monolithic black rock that looms over the landscape. Indeed, take everything I say here with a grain of salt since the vast majority of other reviews I’ve seen so far have been positively glowing.

There are some disturbing things already happening in the first half of this so I can only imagine how it would turn out but after a couple of days of picking it up and putting it down I think it's time to move on for me. There were a few places that I found my attention wandering but overall I quite I enjoyed the story and the path it took. Reading of their coming together as an unlikely trio was fun and established a strong dynamic that prevailed throughout. Yes, I saw similarities to Stephen King's work, (a lot of them, really), but I didn't find this tale to be derivative-I took it as an homage to the King instead. At times though, it seemed like Little Heaven didn't know what it wanted to be-between the main cult story, the interactions of the bounty hunters, the current and past time lines, the things in the woods and in the rock-there was a lot going on.Little Heaven” is included on these Goodreads lists: “Upcoming Books Of Note: Horror”, and “Best Picks: Adult Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Novels of 2017”. The combination of the religious cult aspect with the supernatural forces at work made for a compelling tale. It wasn't that it was too fast for the eye to chart - it was more that the eye rebelled, defaulting on its own optics and reducing whatever was out there to an indefinite smudge.

I think fans of Christopher Buehlman would really like this and at times the prose did remind me of him, but Buehlman just does it better. Stirrings in the woods and over the treetops - the brooding shape of a monolith known as the Black Rock casts its terrible pall. While this book is just under 500 pages, which isn’t terrible in terms of length, it felt much longer. Before we get there, though, Cutter divvies his antihero protagonists' stories across the time stream, jumping back and forth between 1980 and 1966.

Through it and its underlings the nature of evil is touched upon as well in really interesting ways, though the plot is never overburdened by philosophical waxing.