Speaking of James Byron Huggins, I’m wrapping up my little project on him by reading the handful of books of his that I hadn’t read before. The first is, unfortunately, a little disaster called Nightbringer. A group of tourists gets stranded in an isolated monastery high in the mountains when a brutal (and evil!!!!!) snowstorm (yes, the snowstorm itself is, in fact, evil) blows in. The monastery holds a dark secret. There is both an ancient relic and an ancient evil there. The evil is a pair of Nephilim (read: fallen angels/demons). Luckily for the tourists, one of their number is an ageless Roman Centurion charged by Christ Himself just prior to His crucifixion to fight for good in the world. And, boy, this is terrible. The characters are annoyingly flat, the storytelling confused and, in a real twist, the action sequences are dreadful, so confusingly and poorly written as to leave the reader struggling to figure out what’s happening to who and when and where. I have loved a lot of Huggins’ books and found some of them to still be solid genre novels even if they aren’t perfect. Well, this one isn’t even a decent trashy genre novel. This is one of the worst books I’ve read this year; maybe the worst. What happened? ½ star.
tl;dr – usually consistent author has a real misfire; not even the action sequences work and this one doesn’t even reach the level of trashiest of genre fare. ½ star.