From Goodreads: "Life sucks, and then you rot. At least that is the case in the world today with the disease Dermadecatis going around. No one knows how it is contracted, but whenever you have it, you rot from the inside, out. Lena’s father, Dr. Alona, is a man with a dark secret, who discovered the “Black Sickness” and was searching for a cure, until he was mysteriously murdered. For months following his death, Lena lived isolated from the world, until she is forced into a night on the town where she hears the news of a cure. Could there really be a cure?"

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this e-book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Ah, where to start with Antidote. I read the description of this book a few days ago and was immediately interested. It sounded like a really cool concept: a disease that causes you to rot from the inside out and the way you contract it is completely unknown. I figured that since my favorite time of the year was coming up (Fall/Halloween) why not give this a shot as my first YA horror book review of the season!

Unfortunately, my expectations were set too high.

Now, that's not to say that the book was necessarily bad, I just don't think that this was a book I would go back and read again. Allow me to explain.

With such an interesting synopsis, you would think this would be a pretty decent zombie book, correct? Sadly, it is not.

Yes, there was a disease. Yes, someone came along and magically had a "cure" for said disease. Yes, things went bad with said "cure". And, yes, now a small group of people are going to try to save the world from this disease. But that was only a very small part of the book.

Basically, at some point before the book, boy meets girl, boy asks girl on date, girl says yes, boy stands up girl, girl hates boy. Then boy magically comes back into girl's life at the perfect time and basically pulls a Kyle Reese and sweeps girl away from danger. Once Lena and Jared are together, it's game over. The book does a complete 180 and switches from potential zombie story to love story.

It may just be me, but there was too much happening between these two way too fast. She goes from being mad at him but secretly still having feelings from him to being mad at him because he's a jerk to being so head over heels in love with him that she doesn't want to ever be without him again.

Wait, what?

You've known this guy for all of a handful of days and now you're in love with him? Sorry, but that's where I drew the metaphorical line.

I feel like the book had so much potential for being a really good story, but the fact that it went from a story about the disease to a story about how these two characters loved each other so much that they couldn't picture life without the other was just a bit too much for me. It started off with a great story line and I was definitely interested, but it went from 0 to 100 way too fast with the romance between Lena and Jared.

The only character I enjoyed to any degree was Holland, and she's a minor character. The rest were really hard to like and even harder to try to relate to in any way. I feel like with the next book, the characters could really use some fine tuning to help readers get to know and like them better.

I came into this book expecting horror and got a love story. Yes, there were some parts about the disease and the big bad corporation that was trying to control the cure, but it was in the first handful of chapters and was hardly referenced again throughout the entire rest of the book. Unfortunately, this book just did not do it for me.

If you're a fan of YA horror, you'll get a small fix with Antidote, but expect a lot of frustrated teenage love story thrown in there as well. I was personally not a fan, but maybe someone will give this book a chance and like it more than I did!