Unbury Carol

Cover image and synopsis from Goodreads:

Carol Evers is a woman with a dark secret. She has died many times . . . but her many deaths are not final: They are comas, a waking slumber indistinguishable from death, each lasting days.

Only two people know of Carol’s eerie condition. One is her husband, Dwight, who married Carol for her fortune, and—when she lapses into another coma—plots to seize it by proclaiming her dead and quickly burying her . . . alive. The other is her lost love, the infamous outlaw James Moxie. When word of Carol’s dreadful fate reaches him, Moxie rides the Trail again to save his beloved from an early, unnatural grave.

And all the while, awake and aware, Carol fights to free herself from the crippling darkness that binds her—summoning her own fierce will to survive. As the players in this drama of life and death fight to decide her fate, Carol must in the end battle to save herself.

I absolutely loved Josh Malerman’s Bird Box when I read it a few years ago, so I was excited to read anything he wrote next. His book Black Mad Wheel came out last year but I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. But when I read the synopsis for Unbury Carol, I knew I had to read it.

This book took me a little while to get into, but I think that’s because I was hoping for something like Bird Box, and this is definitely not that. But once I put that out of my head and got into this, it was so good! It was definitely strange and creepy, which was great, and it was unpredictable. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen to anyone or how it was going to end.

Reviews seem to be all over the place for this one. Some people really disliked it and others, like me, really enjoyed it, so it will be interesting to hear from other readers.