Book Review – Brother by Ania Ahlborn

This book is deeply unsettling. It follows a young man who was “adopted” by a reclusive family when he was four. Really, this family kept this child against his will and he eventually forgot his previous life. The mother is also a killer who enjoys stabbing young women to death. Her oldest biological son, Ray, inherits this violent need to kill and also carries with him a spiteful jealousy of Michael, the boy they adopted.

Ray blames Michael for all the awful things that happened to one of his sisters when they were kids and believes that women turn evil if they become sexual in any way. This includes his other sister who he catches dancing with Michael. I’m about to get spoilery as there is no way to review this without doing so. If you plan on reading this book and dont’ want to know what happens, stop reading.

Ray has a plan to get back at Michael and it takes him years to plan it. As the book unfolds, as the reader you know that one of the women Ray brings to the house for his mother to kill is Michael’s biological mother. The author uses this as a red herring twist when the real twist is that the pretty girl that Ray introduces to Michael, the girl that Michael develops feelings for, is actually is biological sister.

What unfolds in the final act leaves a trail of dead bodies as Michael realizes that his adoptive family was never truly his family and her tries to save his sister from them. Ray has other plans and the two young men try to kill each other as the sister tries to escape before she bleeds to death.

The story here is fine. Obvious, but fine. What is so unsettling is the amount of rape and violence that ensues throughout the novel, and how Michael just seemed to be okay with it all. At least until he wasn’t. Michael never steps in to save any of these women that Ray rapes and the mother stabs repeatedly. Ray is awful. The mother is awful. Michael isn’t much better.

I had a hard time finishing this book, which is saying something because Ania Ahlborn is one of my favorite horror authors. The writing is same old Ania, but the story and the characters are just off putting. I have no issues with stories that have the perspective of the bad guy, but this was hard to get through. There is nothing redeeming about any of these people. Even when Michael decides to kill the family of murderers he was essentially kidnapped into, it is too little too late. He could have left at any time. Went to the police. Went to anyone. Instead he was complicit and chose violence as his way out. None of the women killed by this family will ever be found because the family ate them (chopped them up and put their meat into stews). No justice for them for there is no evidence.

The plot hole of all these women being taken in the area where this family lives and no one seems to notices is mind boggling. Even if they chose women they thought no one would notice were missing, there could be only so many drifters in such a remote area. Did local police not notice when women were going missing? Even if this family took people from multiple towns, eventually, someone somewhere would have thought about the circular radius in which the women had gone missing in and started searching the middle of it.

Maybe I’ve seen too many cop shows. Too many episodes of CSI and Dexter and The X-Files. But someone would have noticed something at some point. I probably would have liked this better if Michael’s biological sister had always been searching for him and had figured out the missing women in the process. That would have been a book I would have loved. Instead, this is a book about a rapist killer’s revenge against his adoptive brother because his real siblings liked Michael better.

Not a terrible read, but one I only barely made it through. Wouldn’t recommend if you have certain triggers. This is one of those books that has a lot of potential, but squanders it on the unsettling parts of the story.

3 out of 5 stars. And I’m being generous because I love Ania Ahlborn’s writing.