The last thing Nick Morrow expected to receive was an invitation from his father to return home. When he left rural Nebraska behind, he believed he was leaving everything there, including his abusive father, Carlyle, forever. But neither Nick nor his brother Joshua, disowned for marrying Emilia, a woman of Asian descent, can ignore such summons from their father, who hopes for a deathbed reconciliation.
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.
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.
