The Stalking Dead by Eva Chase

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kinda dead. Straight-up psycho. Totally obsessed with her.

I did a bad, bad thing.

Thanks to a blank in my memory, I’m not sure what that thing was, but it was horrible enough to get me locked up in the mental ward for seven years. Horrible enough that my little sister won’t even speak to me.

But when I’m released back into a town determined to rub my unknown sins in my face, the past isn’t the only thing that’s haunting me. The four “imaginary” friends who made my childhood bearable barge into my life in a very real way.

They’re crude, criminally inclined, and more than a little unstable after ages trapped in afterlife limbo. All they want is to protect me. Worship me. Avenge me.

So they’ll bludgeon, maim, eviscerate—tear a strip of havoc right through this sleepy town.

Even rise from the dead.

Maybe I’m still not all that sane either, because part of me finds them strangely appealing. In ways very different from how I felt as a kid. And that’s not the only strangeness stirring inside me…

I promised myself I’d stick to the straight and narrow from here on. But what if the only way to set things right is to get a little ghoulish?

The Stalking Dead

These guys take possessive to a new level!

The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💙💚❤️💜💖
Steam: 🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📘📙📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌏🌍🌎
Character development: 🤓😉☺️😍🥰
Narration: 🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration Type: Dual Narration

The heroine: Lily – something awful happened to her, though she has no memory of it. She has been locked up in a psych ward for seven years when she is finally released and is going to college and is determined to act normal. Though now she is back in her hometown it seems it is filled with people who treat her like crap because of her history. All she really wants to do is get back in her sister’s good graces, which is hard because she doesn’t remember what it was that she did.

The Heroes: Nox, Kai, Ruin, Jett – They were motorcycle gang members before they were shot dead, and as ghosts Lily was the only person that could hear or see them.
Nox – the leader and is dominant and protective, he immediately knows who Lily is when he sees her even though it has been many years since she disappeared from their afterlife.
Kai – he was the nerd of the group and was extremely intelligent and wore glasses when he was alive. He has a theory that they can all get bodies again. His plan is to commit murders so they have bodies that they can use and possess.
Ruin – he is an optimist and at first glance seems innocuous but can become vicious and cruel when needed.
Jett – he is the quiet brute of the group, he is broody, grumpy and doesn’t speak unless it is something really worth saying.

The Story: When Lily was young, she imagined that she wasn’t alone when she was down by the marsh, she could see the ghostly outlines of the four men and hear them as they played with her and protected her. Though now she is an adult, when she seems to hear voices calling her, she ignores them because she knows that would be just crazy to really hear her childish imaginary friends.

The guys end up taking over the bodies of guys who had been bullying Lily.
Mr. Grimes – he was a professor of Lily’s and called her out on the first day for being late and for having been in an institution. Nox decides to possess him since he has a bit of power over the students.
Zach – Big man on campus and star of the football team. He made fun of Lily as soon as she appeared on Campus. Kai possesses him because he is so opposite of his true form and personality.
Ansel – he is Mr. Popular and has a bunch of people who follow him around. He felt the need to tell all of them about Lily’s past and dumped a cup of coffee on her. Ruin possesses him, since Jett doesn’t talk enough to fit this one.
Vince – he was Lily’s peer counselor and he didn’t ask for the job and didn’t want it and made it known to Lily right away. Jett possesses him.

This is an original story, different than anything I have read before. I like the fact that the guys killed and possessed new guys that didn’t like them, but as time went on they started to look more and more like themselves as time went on. They had some makeovers, colored their hair and added glasses to look a bit more like themselves, and gradually things like muscles, skin shade and other things took on what they originally looked like.

The story also had a lot about the fact that the guys couldn’t just take on these new bodies and be their old selves, since these four guys had lives, jobs, friends etc… So they had to try to separate themselves from the former lives of the men they took possession of in order to do what they wanted with their new lives. They didn’t want to be a professor, a football player, a popular guy or a brilliant student.

This audiobook was told in multiple points of view via dual narration. It was narrated by Hollie Jackson and Joe Arden. These are both terrific narrators. Hollie Jackson’s voice isn’t my favorite, except for the Ice Planet Barbarian books. I think I got so used to her narrating those books, that it makes it hard to hear her in something different, though I do acknowledge what a great job she does. Joe Arden is always fantastic and is one of my favorite male narrators. My only critique is that I wish there were separate narrators for each of the male characters.

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