Review: Lockdown

Lockdown
Alexander Gordon Smith
Escape From Furnace #1

Furnace Penitentiary: the world’s most secure prison for young offenders, buried a mile beneath the earth’s surface. Convicted of a murder he didn’t commit, sentenced to life without parole, “new fish” Alex Sawyer knows he has two choices: find a way out, or resign himself to a death behind bars, in the darkness at the bottom of the world. Except in Furnace, death is the least of his worries. Soon Alex discovers that the prison is a place of pure evil, where inhuman creatures in gas masks stalk the corridors at night, where giants in black suits drag screaming inmates into the shadows, where deformed beasts can be heard howling from the blood-drenched tunnels below. And behind everything is the mysterious, all-powerful warden, a man as cruel and dangerous as the devil himself, whose unthinkable acts have consequences that stretch far beyond the walls of the prison.

Together with a bunch of inmates—some innocent kids who have been framed, others cold-blooded killers—Alex plans an escape. But as he starts to uncover the truth about Furnace’s deeper, darker purpose, Alex’s actions grow ever more dangerous, and he must risk everything to expose this nightmare that’s hidden from the eyes of the world.

Rating: 4/5

What I Liked:
~ I could not put this down! The idea is one I've never seen before and it totally sucked me in from the first page. Alex gets sent to this prison that is horrible beyond belief. It's literally a living hell... minus the living part. One thing I found refreshing about this book was there was absolutely no romance and it was a guys point of view. Somehow that seems hard to come by these days. This book was gory and gruesome but somehow it still seemed (for lack of a better word) "pleasant" enough for girls to enjoy as well as guys.

What I Didn't Like:
~ While I understand this book is supposed to be about a place that is so "hellish" that you couldn't even imagine it. There were some ideas that seemed a bit too impossible. With books like this, they are only scary if it seems like it could possibly come true at some point. When you cross the line from science fiction to just ridiculous  it loses some of its scare factor. Also, it had a pretty bad cliffhanger.

Cover: 
~ Can you say CREEPY? That is one of the gruesome creatures that wander around in the night.

In All:
~ This book was filled with twists and turns and kept me on the edge of my seat. It's one of those books where you can't believe something like that was happening but the author makes it seem so real. Sadly, there was a HUGE cliffhanger that felt like they cut off the book in the middle of a chapter. But it was definitely a good book.

Have you read this book? What did you think?