Titles: The Resurrection Box: A Tale of Mormon Horror
Author: Declan Hyde
Publisher: Gypsy Fox Publishing
Genre: Horror
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 140
Reviewed by Liz Busby
(I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.)
I am not a horror enthusiast, but I don’t mind a little sprinkled into my speculative fiction for flavor. This book sits at a very comfortable level for me. In fact, the horror doesn’t really hit until the 2/3 mark. The opening and development of the book set up two realistic characters: Zina, a polygamous wife who loses her young child in the first pages of the book, and Bill, a trapper disaffected from the church because of his discomfort with polygamy. Though the motivation of one character is more believable than the other, they both feel like real people.
The goal they pursue, and the enemy who is on a collision course with them, are both littered with genuine LDS detail which nonetheless should be accessible to non-members as well. The horror, when it shows up, was unexpected, coming half a beat after I expected it, which meant I’d let my guard down and was genuinely surprised.
I won’t spoil the ending, but after all the characters’ travails, I felt slightly betrayed by an unresolved twist that comes in the last few paragraphs of the story and undermines the work the character has done to come to terms with what has happened. It might have been intended as genuinely faith building, but I felt the reader deserved to hang around a bit longer to understand how this new event would fit into the construct of faith and reason built in the preceding chapter. The book might have been stronger without it.
Overall, a short horror adventure worth your time if you like your mysteries theological.