Just finished a horror that is now one of my favorite books (The Summer I Died by Ryan C. Thomas). The author made one of the characters so incredibly likable and you just wanted him to succeed. Down on his luck a bit but you knew he was going to pull through. Then you watch him be tortured by an insane serial killer and it sticks with. You really wanted him to be okay and he's not. The other main character (the POV character) was repelled by the violence and his reaction to seeing it was effective and relatable, especially his instinctual desire for the torturers attention to be off him and unfortunately on his friend. Which became a sort of mental torture. Don't recommend it unless you can handle extreme gore though. There's an image from it I won't be able to get out of my mind for a while. Think a tear or two managed to crawl down my cheek when I read it. Great dialogue and characters. The first part of the story was all set up to make you relate to and care for the characters then he makes you watch horrible things happen to them. I'm not normally into extreme horror but this was written so well it's in my top 5 now.
That's another thing about the book I was reading. Both were bad. The anticipation was good and the actual horror moments also served as further anticipation for MORE horror. The guy would come do something horrible to them, go away and come back to do something worse. And you learn to expect worse each time while thinking "it can't get much worse for them" but it could and did. The bad guy also had these dice that decided who he would hurt and pure chance was left to decide whose bad luck was up. You were left never knowing when the POV character's time was coming. He just kept watching bad things happen to people he cared about knowing if his own torture didn't come soon that just meant he'd watch all the others die.
