By Mattie Lugar
As we are steadily getting into autumn, spooky season is right around the corner. If your favorite brand of spooky just happens to be cryptids, then I have the perfect book for you. (Mostly) Human Resources by Grace Viall is set in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia and follows Alexys and Nic who work for a cryptid management company known as Entity. Alexys works specifically in Human Resources and manages Wardens, the people responsible for managing cryptids across the country, while Nic works in Research and Cataloging.
When one of Alexys’ Wardens goes missing after talking about finding a highly dangerous monster that’s never been recorded, she is determined to go into the woods and find him safe and sound. What she doesn’t realize is that this monster, The Hollow Walker, hasn’t been recorded for a reason, and she’s way in over her head.
As Nic and Alexys venture through the woods to find the Warden, the book gets creepier and creepier. When I first got into this book, I thought it would be a fun light-hearted story about chasing cryptids, but I was so incredibly wrong. I was actually terrified reading the last 60% of this book, and it didn’t help that Alexys has little to no survival skills.I firmly believe that if she was out there without Nic, this story would have been a lot shorter. There were definitely a few times I needed to put the book down for a little while simply because things really started to take a turn the further along I got.
Something I did love was seeing a ton of different cryptids represented as both Nic and Alexys were traveling through the woods, but sometimes I truly do forget just how terrifying the mountains I call home can be. If you love anything and everything that has to deal with cryptids, I highly recommend this book. It’s technically a cozy horror, but I think there’s less emphasis on the cozy and a lot more on the horror.