Review: Erebos

Erebos by Ursula Poznanski

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Imagine getting sucked into a computer game…no, not literally! But becoming so absorbed by the game that you lose sleep, skip school, bail on your friends. That’s what happens to Nick. Nick starts playing Erebos, this game where you battle creatures and try to stay alive. But there are some rules involved with Erebos…you must play alone, you can’t speak about the game, you can not reveal your gameself outside of the game and you can’t reveal your real identity inside the game. If you die, you are out of the game, forever.

Interestingly, the game seems “alive”. The game characters ask pointed questions of you, not generic ones. The game also asks you to do tasks in real life…like take someone out on a date or follow and photograph someone. After a while, Nick starts to feel uncomfortable with some of the tasks he is asked to perform, and he is booted out of the game. That’s when things start to get really interesting!

Erebos is a really well thought out, highly imaginative story with a whole ton of twists and turns. I thought I knew who and what was behind everything, but didn’t. It was incredibly hard to put down.

When the story started out, we followed Nick into the game. The whole first half of the book is Nick playing the game. As someone who does enjoy video games, I didn’t have a problem with this. The pacing was good…about the time I started to get bored with reading about the game, Nick gets kicked out. This is when the story really picks up.

People start getting hurt for speaking out against the game. Nick is almost a statistic himself! This is when the pieces of the puzzle start coming together and you get just an inkling of what might be coming up next.

People say that people hide behind online personas…that humans say things and do things online that they would never do in real life…this story was a melding of both elements. It’s a story I am still thinking about and reflecting upon long after reading it. I would be really interested in reading more by Ursula Poznanski!




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