This one just wasn't for me. As soon as the story harped on about how young the girlfriend was, I said, "I bet she's some kind of youth-sucker. She's too much of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl for a horror story otherwise."
Beyond being predictable, which can be a neutral or even a positive quality, I disliked this story because it was a thematic jumble. The protagonist's personal crisis didn't mesh with the horror element in the slightest; it's pure happenstance that he's the one dating the evil witch. The war imagery felt like a grab for pathos, and it didn't work for me; it was bland and formulaic, like a retread of things people often say about war rather than a visceral evocation of the feelings involved. Beyond feeling flat, though, the war doesn't inform anything that happens; we might as well have had a retired postal service employee or former veterinarian for a hero for all the difference it made.
For instance, "It's hard to tell who the bad guys are" is one of those banal things people say in wartime, which I could forgive except that the way it's used in the story makes no sense. The girlfriend was actively
lying about who she was and concealing her handiwork, so of
course it's hard to detect that she's a bad guy. There's no blurring of lines here, no confusion about whether one is doing the right thing, no struggle to retain humanity in an extreme situation; the girlfriend is straight-up wicked witch evil, doing bad stuff for the sake of being bad. The only reason the protagonist has any hesitance in attacking her is because he's been dipping his wick there for months. She's a cardboard villain, without much depth or deeper meaning to her, and her particular brand of villainy is a total non-sequitur to the rest of the story. I mean, if we'd seen some hint of a dark side in the hero, some talk about enjoying the killing he did in war, about seeking it out later in bloodsports or some such and restraining himself only with difficulty from pushing beyond the limits, then there might have been some tie-in. Or if the hero's flashbacks had focused more on a regret for passing time, a fervent desire to regain youth and vigor, such that he might be tempted by the idea of getting mystic vitality even at a terrible cost, that could have worked, too. But there's nothing; it's
Sea Lion and Squirrel.
Between the uninspiring villain and the undramatic flashbacks, this one was a total flop for me.