A Literary Apothecary

Thank you to Titan Books and NetGalley for this advanced reader copy!

Based on the current distribution of the reviews on GoodReads, I’m coming in with a bit of an unpopular opinion. I really did not like this book. I genuinely think this book sent me into a reading slump that I am still recovering from. I’m going into a LOT of detail, so I’m sorry for the long review.

Mariner’s Cove is a quiet, safe town, until a massive hurricane blows through and upsets the balance of the neighborhood. Residents feel strangely draw to items thrown about by the storm, and they begin to share strange dreams with each other about a mysterious event: Endgame. Cory might be the only one in town who knows the storm is not what it seems. Far from a normal hurricane, this was the awakening of a beast beyond comprehension, a dragon, and it needs Cory. He has strange abilities that allow him to read minds, move objects with telekinesis, and maybe even contain the dragon itself.

There are too many characters in The Hive. I think that a lot of them are necessary, but the amount of detail we see into their lives is not. Cory and Ellen are both incredibly important to the plot, and I would argue that they absolutely are and should remain the main characters. Cory is a boy who has psychic powers that have been growing stronger and stronger, and the big bad of this book, what he calls “the dragon,” is seeking him out for some mysterious reason. He calls these powers a “gnome” in his head, and while I don’t hate that it does undercut some of the more tense moments. I couldn’t help imagining a little garden gnome with a silly hat and cute overalls. Ellen is Cory’s mother, a woman who is trying to keep her son safe in a world that is suddenly out to get them. The only other book I’ve read by Malfi is Night Parade, and this dynamic is extremely similar to that book. A parent trying to protect their special child in a world gone mad. The good thing about that is Malfi is great at writing this dynamic.

I also really liked everything involving Brian, though I’m not really sure I needed to read as much backstory as we got about him. Brian used to have psychic abilities like Cory, but an incident in his past dampened his connection to this ability and caused Ellen to cut him off. Brian goes through a fairly strong arc throughout the story, and the ways the dragon was able to try to manipulate, isolate, and cause division in this family were really compelling. I do think his ending was a bit cliché, and I saw it coming from miles away.

The other characters all have their roles, and I think it would’ve been fine to have the occasional chapter from their point of view to connect the reader to the supernatural happenings at Mariner’s Cove. Stinger is essentially the primary antagonist, and his chapters and perspective are very important for the reader to understand what is happening with the Hive, but so many of the other characters were not necessary to understand that idea!

Georgette and her husband Alex were characters that I could’ve seen a lot less of. It was great to see how the Hive was working through their brains, but we got that exact same perspective from Stinger. Michael Danver, the first perspective of an obsessed townsperson, was the most interesting and the one the reader should’ve stuck with. He essentially discovered all the information that the other hive members did, but he did it FIRST. He knew about the cracks, the symbols, the objects, the mutilations, the dreams. We got it all from Danver, and the we got it all again, and again, and again.

Sarah is… an interesting case. Ultimately, I don’t really think she was necessary to the plot either, but I feel like she could’ve been a more compelling character. Sarah is pregnant, and she doesn’t really want to be. Not only is she pregnant the Hive seems to be able to communicate with her through her fetus, or perhaps is literally a part of the fetus. This, unfortunately, doesn’t really lead to anything. The object that Sarah feels the need to obsessively collect is wire coat hangers. I explained this to my husband and he immediately made the connection that I think everyone would make here. Wire hangers were and are used to perform unsafe abortions for women who do not have access to safe methods. They’re basically a symbol of abortion! What does the author do with this? Absolutely nothing. He doesn’t seem to make the connection at all. Why? I’m not saying I wanted Sarah to give herself an abortion or anything, that’s pretty intense, but to not even consider the thematic implications of making a pregnant teenager obsessed with wire hangers is utterly bizarre.

I understand what the author was trying to do here. If you are going to write a book about a whole town being possessed, you need enough people to fill a town. However, I don’t think any mind was paid to the pacing of the book when writing this many characters. You can write me a whole Wikipedia page about each character, telling me all about their lives and feelings to make them extremely three-dimensional (which I believe these characters are), but that doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences.

The pacing of The Hive is absolutely horrendous. Even the positive reviews make note of how insanely long and slow this book is, but it’s hard to actually capture the feeling of reading it. It is intriguing at first and it maintained my attention very well for the first hundred pages, but there are so many characters and each of them is experiencing a very similar story. It becomes so repetitive. The thing with the teeth buzzing was making me actually start to lose my mind. Nothing exemplifies this non-stop repetition so much as the “snake thing.”

The hive members cannot perceive the actual form of the Dragon which is great. That’s very cosmic horror, and the book does an interesting job at trying to describe what this creature looks like and how it behaves. There’s a great metaphor nearly the end of the story that I felt provided needed context for the readers and made the stakes more apparent. But at the climax the creature kind of “appears.” I don’t think this is very spoiler-y and I’m not going to describe anything that actually happens in the climax, but I want to talk about this chapter where literally every single character’s perspective of what the creature looks like is described.

Cory sees the dragon as smoke. Sarah sees the dragon as a Chinese dancing dragon. Georgette sees the dragon as a garter snake. Alex sees the dragon as a tube. Pamela sees the dragon as a 2D serpent. Eric sees the dragon as a water moccasin. Michael sees the dragon as an artery. Stinger sees the dragon as honeybees. OH MY GOD! Stop! Stop describing the same thing over and over again! Please! The worst part of this chapter is that every single character I just mentioned has already described the dragon in the exact same terms in their own chapters earlier in the book! I already know what each character perceives the dragon as, I promise I was paying attention!

The climax itself had me feeling a little bit conflicted. Can something be both exciting and predictable? Can you be sad for a character if you always knew their fate from chapter one? Maybe. I was aware of exactly what was going to happen with Brain, Cory, and the rest of the Hive members from basically the moment these characters explained the plan, but I did still feel the momentum and excitement picking back up again. The descriptions of the chaos and aftermath were well done with an appropriate sense of gravitas and finality. Again, like everything else in this book, it was a bit repetitive as we had to read what every character was doing during the climax. I did think it was a bit odd how little of an impact the events of the story ultimately had on the characters and the town as a whole.

The writing is… fine. I’m sure this what just a part of me receiving an advanced copy, but the book needed another serious line edit. There were several descriptions that had me ranging from rolling my eyes to completely confused. This was one of my favorites:

“She stares at a spot of moonlight on the floor below for what feels like an impossible length of time. It shines like water in the moonlight.”

The Hive (2026)

The moonlight shined like moonlight? You don’t say. This is one of the more egregious examples but I do think that at times Malfi was trying a bit too hard to write metaphorically and some of the lines end up nearly incomprehensible and much longer than necessary because of all that. The atmosphere was good! The idea of a creeping madness spreading through your friends and neighbors is inherently quite terrifying. I liked the compulsions that these people had, their mistrust of each other, and their desire for their objects. I do think the atmosphere mostly comes through in Danver’s perspective and Cory’s perspective, and the others lack a bit of the mystery that these two characters hold.

Before I dive too much into the actual horror elements, I would like to make note that a significant part of the horror writing in this book are detailed, dramatic descriptions of a morbidly obese woman. It was to the point that it was notable how often the author felt the need to describe this woman’s fatness and how disgusting that was.

“Queenie was awake, her massive bulk avalanched against the headboard and a dam of sweat-yellowed pillows. Her pale, doughy skin was refracting the sickly bluish glow from the flickering TV across the room”

“Queenie smiled as she chewed, her chin glistening with grease. It was a grotesque manipulation of her features, the heavy jowls ratcheting upward as if by hydraulics, the dull black shark eyes thinning to cheery, pencil-thin crescents.

The Hive (2026)

The other characters are not described like this. Stinger gets the occasional intense description of his appearance, but the other characters are only really described sparsely. Often, their current state is described: evidence of being sick, looking pale or sickly, a wound or bruise, and very often their smell. The level of detail that the author uses to describe Queenie, who is a disabled woman who cannot care for herself, is… a lot. Queenie doesn’t feed herself or have the ability to bath herself. She is not just obese, she has health conditions. So, I don’t feel the disgust that I believe Malfi was aiming for towards Queenie; I feel like she’s being neglected by her caretaker.

The only other time characters are described in this much detail is when they become literal horror monsters. There are these “cracks” in the world that can horribly mutate people if they interact with them which is a very cool concept. The few times I felt genuine horror in this book were because of these mutations, and they way they were described was fantastic. There is some excellent horror in this book, and I don’t want to deny that. I just wish that more of the horror wasn’t based in a “fear of fatness” and a “fear of disfigurement” in Stinger’s case.

Everything to do with the bees was fascinating, I just really wish they appeared earlier in the book. As is, everything involving bees and the primary antagonist, Stinger, is not introduced until the 30% mark of the book. There aren’t even any hints towards them, and I think they could’ve been a very ominous presence throughout the story. I really liked the horror of the bees and Queenie, and I do think there’s an interesting metaphorical layer I can’t really go into here because of spoilers. For how important the bees are, they really should’ve been a presence from the beginning.

Okay, that was extremely long. If you’ve made it to this point in the review, you probably think that I don’t recommend this book. I would say if you’re a reader like myself, you probably won’t enjoy this book. However, if you liked The Stand by Steven King, this might be up your alley. There is something very “King” about the way this is written: the characters, the pacing, the small town. I do actually think a lot of this story feels extremely dated, like it’s taking place in the 90s, too.

I read the author’s note, and I feel like it explains a lot of the issues that I had with the novel. Apparently, the first draft of this manuscript was written over a decade ago, and it was a THOUSAND pages. I cannot even begin to imagine what that first tome of a book was like if this was the final product. I think this is a project that’s been worked and reworked until it’s lost its shape. It became bloated and repetitive, and Malfi just loved it too much to realize the monster it had become. This book should’ve never been published.

The Hive releases on April 14th, 2026
(*All quoted passages are subject to change! I read a version of the book that was NOT final copy, so take my quoted passaged with a grain of salt!)

Does the Dog Die?

There is a dog in this book, a little Pomeranian named Clementine. Unfortunately, the dog does die, and it dies quite gruesomely. He dies via poisoning.

Trigger warnings:

animal cruelty, animal death, blood, pregnancy, body horror, fatphobia, murder, violence, sexual violence, dubious consent, alcoholism, drug abuse, stalking.