I Don't Want to Kill You by Dan Wells

 

Goodreads synopsis: John Cleaver has called a demon—literally called it, on the phone, and challenged it to a fight. He’s faced two of the monsters already, barely escaping with his life, and now he’s done running; he’s taking the fight to them. But as he wades through his town’s darkest secrets, searching for any sign of who the demon might be, one thing becomes all too clear: in a game of cat and mouse with a supernatural killer, the human is always the mouse.

In I Am Not a Serial Killer we watched a budding sociopath break every rule he had to save his town from evil. In Mr. Monster we held our breath as he fought madly with himself, struggling to stay in control. Now John Cleaver has mastered his twisted talents and embraced his role as a killer of killers. I Don’t Want to Kill You brings his story to a thundering climax of suspicion, mayhem, and death.

It’s time to punish the guilty.

And in a town full of secrets, everyone is guilty of something.

My rating: 3 stars.

Content warnings: R. Violence and mild sexual content. Trigger warning for suicide and self harm.

(spoilers below)

Thoughts: I'm a little disappointed in this story, and especially the ultimate culmination of John's story. The world of monsters still feels like something of an afterthought, and wasn't really tied in to the unfolding of the story very well, in my opinion. It could have been integrated a lot better.

And the ending both in terms of stakes, and in what happened for the characters, seemed to fall flat in a lot of ways. I'm disappointed that there had to be a death to kill the demon, and not finding another way around it seemed like a massive oversight on the part of the author. I get how he tried to redeem that fact, but in the end it didn't really work.

Plus, the theme of suicide that was being woven into the story, was completely undermined by the monster. I'm not saying that idea couldn't have been done well. But it needed much more capable writing, and a longer period of time to deal with the impacts and what that meant for the story and the theme, rather than it just being a thing that happened.

I know I would have been very curious if I hadn't read the second and third books of this trilogy, but I do hold that the first one is really the only one worth taking the time to read, unless you have absolutely nothing else to read.