“Prey” has flavors of a cop-procedural, apocalyptic level stakes, paranormal monsters, and good old fashion horror. There’s a lot going on in Majka’s first book in the “Blood of the Ancients” series, and this first installment does a great job laying the groundwork for the series! “Prey” follows Eric Archer as he discovers the truth behind his parent’s gruesome murders, and uncovers long buried family secrets that may stretch back several generations. As Eric and those he works with uncover that their foe is an evil godlike entity, they have a limited amount of time to come to terms with their whole reality being upended, and put the beast back where it belongs. Only the fate of the world hangs in the balance, so, no pressure?

I got this book for Christmas which, once you read it (because you should) may sound kind of funny. It’s not the kind of feel good story one would expect to receive as a Christmas gift, but it IS wonderfully written. I’m not going to spoil anything about this book, so this review will (hopefully) be one of my shorter ones. I made the mistake of telling someone I was going to read “The Girl with all the Gifts” and the first thing they said was “Oh my god! I love that book! I knew there would be a twist but I wasn’t expecting…” Needless to say, I was pretty mad and it honestly spoiled the first 50 or 60 pages of the book for me. I’m not going to be that guy.

This is one of the first short story collections I’ve read since I’ve left high school. Honestly, I just preferred longer stories when I had “limited” free reading time during college and after work. But, as we draw nearer to Halloween and I am branching out to writing my own short stories completely separate from “The Monster of Selkirk” series, I decided it was about time I brush up on the short story format. So I killed two birds with one stone here: a book of nothing but scary stories! Which does make this a bit of a unique review for me as well, since there are a slew of different stories of varying lengths with different kinds of monsters… I’m not going to review each story individually. It would make this review unnecessarily long and, more importantly, ruin all of the elements of suspense, horror, and general creepy factor for the entire collection. So I’ll be looking at Sutton’s book as a collective whole rather than its individual stories.