Pedersen maintains a sense of doom, building suspense and expectation ... Pedersen weaves eerie sentences together from archaic language, and the novel builds with a gruesome, anxious energy as the author reveals its connection to Chinese mythology ... The novel’s final pages are a wild frenzy of beauty, vengeance and viscera.
Pedersen is a great writer with a strong voice and an obvious love of language that manifests itself in the use of uncommon words like “eidolon” and “demesne" ... When it comes to trauma and atmosphere, the writing shines ... When it comes to romance, the writing turns a little melodramatic and florid ... Luckily, the tension and violence outweigh the romance, and the result establishes Pedersen as a future master of speculative fiction.
Tense, lush, and laced with beautifully engineered dread, this is a special book ... Pedersen joins the ranks of horror’s great prose stylists ... There’s a remarkable restraint in Pedersen’s story structure, yet the book never feels like it’s spinning its wheels.
Lyrical and unsettling ... Pedersen's prose is both poetic and raw. The novel has the cadence of a classical tragedy while being addictively propulsive ... Sacrificial Animals is extraordinary for its illumination of unexpected empathy, and it suggests that the catharsis of vindication is never simple.
Pedersen’s debut skillfully balances character and atmosphere. Recommend to readers who like creepy, methodically paced stories that focus on unease, such as the work of Kevin Brockmeier.
Incantatory ... [Pedersen] writes with a rare acuity, bending her language toward fable ... She is excellent at blurring the animal and human, even as her unbroken tone lacks the quotidian details that can relieve and ratchet horror.
Unsettling ... The close third-person narration stays mainly on Nick, whose mind proves unpleasant and unsettling to spend so much time inside, but this will be a feature, not a bug, to readers of grisly, literary horror that isn’t afraid to show its teeth.
