Book Review: The Fovea Experiments by M.J. Mars
Title: The Fovea Experiments
Author: M.J. Mars
Release date: July 4th, 2025
*Huge thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a digital ARC of this!*
I’m a huge fan of what Patrick and Wicked House Publishing have been doing and the books they’ve been releasing have been a ton of fun so far. I’ve had my eye on Mars ‘The Suffering,’ which came out a few years ago, but haven’t managed to get to reading it yet.
After taking a break for a bit from Netgalley, recently I’ve been jumping back on and when I saw this one, I hit request super quick. I’m a huge fan of the ‘sleep experiments’ trope of Reddit/Urban Legend/ Creepy Pasta type stories. The Russian Sleep Experiment is probably the one that’s spread the most of the years, and seeing that this one was based on a sleep experiment gone wrong, I was stoked to dive in and see what Mars conjured for us.
What I liked: Set roughly twenty years after a sleep experiment went wrong, teen girl Nala, is trying to find her space in the online webisphere of blogging. She’s created a true crime channel and sneaking a look at her mom’s case files – her mom was a detective but after a traumatic incident is now a private investigator – she gets some content. One such file sticks out – about the sleep experiments gone wrong AND it looks like the prime suspect from all those years ago, just happens to be Nala’s current high school teacher.
Naturally, she makes a video and posts it with no regard to what anyone will think and it goes mega viral. Her teacher, Josh, meanwhile has been dealing with sleep issues ever since he was the lone survivor of that prior experiment gone wrong. Now, he needs confront the literal demons he’s been keeping at bay since all those years ago.
Mars dives in with all the grace of an atomic bomb. It’s one blast after another of revelations and jagged deaths. A new sleep experiment is taking place, and it’s being lead by the daughter of the doctor who did the previous one Josh was in. Things go crazy quick here and we see just what horrors lie in the darkness when the participants close their eyes and the blackness forms into a shape.
The final quarter of the book is a full on occult-demon assault that ramped up the creepiness and the body count. It all lead to the terrifying conclusion, which was spot-on perfect.
What I didn’t like: There was a few things that kind of stuck out to me. For the depth of the story that was within, I just don’t think it was explored enough. It would’ve benefited from being another one hundred or even two hundred pages long. That would’ve given it the time to explore the occult back history, give us more depth of the first experiment and would’ve allowed the second experiment participants to not be characters I never really cared for or connected with.
As well, there’s a major, major death that happens involving a focal point of the book and the lack of any sort of real reaction just didn’t work – for me at least. I would’ve expected a surviving character to be crushed and break down and they weren’t. They just kept kind of plodding along and it didn’t feel like a natural reaction.
Why you should buy this: This slotted nicely into that Creepy Pasta world and was a ton of fun. I think for many of the voracious readers out there, this will be an unsettling, occult, one-sitting read that will keep them awake at night and question every shadow. Mars did a wonderful job of setting up the pins and knocking them down, which made for a very engrossing read.
