"Sustaining life meant taking life--that to live was to devour."

I had really high hopes for The Hollow Gods. It started off strong, with an interesting premise and great reviews. It started off pretty okay. We're just doing character development, right? It's okay if it's slow. But I felt like every time I was starting to understand or relate to a character, we would get a perspective shift. This made it really hard to be invested in any character in particular, since it was told from three separate points of view.

So let's talk about characters.

"Was she really a lamb, or a timid lioness?"

Miya is the main character, a young girl who's struggling in school and with mental health. None of this comes back up after the first few chapters, and she becomes a sort of blank slate for the reader to project themselves onto.
Kai is the love interest, a surly wolf/man who's first response to anything is to see if he can make it bleed. Except for Miya, who he would protect with his life if need be, and who he nicknames "Lambchop". He's also perfect in every way and heals up instantly when wounded, but is deeply traumatized and takes his anger out on other people and can smell when people are ovulating. Do with that what you will.
Mason is a doctor. He's in Black Hollow on vacation to get away from the stress of his regular life. He becomes obsessed with Kai and his blood, and spends the whole book trying to prove that the mysteries around Black Hollow aren't real. I honestly feel like he could have been removed from the book entirely and it would've been fine, having him as one of the three main perspectives seemed to only drag out the length of the book.

A little about the plot:

"Stories aren't told to convey the facts. They're told to convey the truth."

Sentences like this one sort of summed up how I felt about much of the plot. There were a lot of sentences that seemed heavy at a glance, but there's not really that much behind them. Everything moved way too slowly, until it didn't. And then we did a world-record speed run to the end. Miya and Kai have an instant love connection, so if that's your thing it's here. Personally, I'd rather talk to a guy more than once (edit: I’ve been corrected, they met twice) before following him into the woods to the ramshackle shed he's squatting in and sleep with him, all while suspecting him of being a murderer. But they're in love. What can you do?
The end of the book is riddled with dream sequences, which are confusing and have pretty large logic leaps to carry you to the end of the book. Everything seems to have deeper meaning, with loads of metaphors. The author does a lot of showing rather than telling, so she'll land these interesting metaphors, and then go on to explain how they're a metaphor just in case you missed it. Which is fine, but I want to be trusted more as a reader.
I think overall this book was fine. It just wasn't really for me. It wasn't really horror, and I never felt that any of the main characters were in any risk. The pacing seemed off, the characters were hard for me to relate to. I think a YA audience would be more suited for this, especially fans of series like Vampire Academy, or Byrne House.

Thanks to Booksirens for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review!