I would place this solidly between the suspense and horror genres. It may not be everybody’s cup of tea, some may find it simplistic or to B-movie-ish in plot and dialogue. Nevertheless, as simplistic as it comes across, its character development feels sufficiently constructed the plot how no holes. If you like foreign places, especially Japan, then you may find some points of interests and localities about the country which are descriptive and well-chosen. There are interpersonal conflicts within the group of travelers that are believable and kindle ones interest .
Overall, the characters and their interactions make sense and I found myself wondering how they would make it out of the eponymous suicide forest. ( )

What a crazy, whirlwind story about a group of friends who were planning on hiking Mt. Fuji, but due to bad weather, ended up in the Suicide Forest.

Brilliantly written with the perfect amount of suspense.

And in the end, life carries on, quite realistically with all the survivors still fighting their own demons that returned with them from the forest. ( )

DNF at 40%. It just didn't grab me. The writing is alright and the characters are annoying. I'm just bored by it.

...and I'm out. Three chapters in, the writing is terrible, the characters are terrible, the story is terrible. It's all tell and no show. The author shoehorns in useless information such as the girlfriend who drank too much the night before (for no reason), or the Japanese guy who seems to be a hard-partying ladies' man, but is wonderful with his mentally-challenged sister (again, no reason to tell us this), and on and on.

It feels like Bates is typing away (you can't, in good conscience, call this writing) when he thinks, Oh gosh, I've mentioned this character a time or two and now I must Develop The Character. Then he throws in some shit, like an untrained cook raiding the fridge for ingredients for a stew he's not sure how to make in the first place.

Honest to god, by the third chapter, I was angry, because I know there's at least three more books in this series, and I have no idea, based on the roughly seven thousand words I read, how it even caught the eye of an agent or publisher. Apparently this book has had some awards heaped on it, and so has the author.

If so, I despair for the state of readership and for the current state of horror. Because this book sucks balls.

BTW, because I didn't finish it, I didn't rate it. But I think we know I'd throw it a negative score if I could.

This book started out like a B movie. A group of people - all stereotypes- go into a haunted forest to hang out and kill time (hah, little pun there) while they wait for the weather to clear on Mr Fuji. Only one Japanese guy in the group and he was unfortunately annoying.

Not sure why the English teachers living in Japan didn't speak Japanese. Heck, I took a year of Japanese and have never been there. (I don't remember much.)

So! I took bets on who would die first.

It was all going well, albeit terribly snail-like slowly, when the book took a sudden, unexpected turn.

What the-??

Not the horror novel I expected or really even wanted. It got weird and not a good weird. I was disappointed.

Off to find a different horror novel. I want ghosts. I expected ghosts! ( )