Book Review: THE SHIVERS

Title: The Shivers

Author: Joe Hill, Stephen Graham Jones, Grady Hendrix, Catriona Ward and Owen King

Publisher: Amazon Original Stories

Pages: 174

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

All five authors featured in this collection were new to me. Nor did I have any idea that two of the writers featured in this collection, Joe Hill and Owen King, are the sons of Stephen King. How interesting to have so much talent in one family!

 

JACKKNIFE by Joe Hill

Dennis Lange, a professor at the University of Maine and the author of a bestselling book on celebrity scandals, is in the throes of a scandal of his own. His marriage has gone bust, after his wife discovered his sexting history with a female student, Parker Townsend, whose father raises a stink and gets him fired. Asked to leave by his wife, Dennis moves into an AirBnB.

Nursing the beginnings of an alcohol addiction, Dennis begins to take walks around the neighbourhood to control his drinking habit. On one such walk, he sees a tree with a knife embedded in it. He pulls out the knife, ignoring the words, Don’t Touch, carved into the bark, and inadvertently sets the tree free.

The tree starts moving about, unleashing a nightmare. By the time, Dennis googles the dates and names carved into the bark, and discovers its grisly history, it is already too late.

 

The story delivered the promised shivers. Joe Hill has written a story about a tree and filled it with menace. Names like University of Maine, Joe Rogan etc root the story in reality, reminding us that otherworldly menace can coexist with ordinary things.

Speaking of sexual abuse of children, the author writes, a lot of it was he-said, she-said, in an era when he-said carried a lot more weight.

The near parallels between Dennis Lange and Orville Shue adds an interesting touch.

+++++++++

THE INDIGO ROOM by Stephen Graham Jones

This is a story set in the real world with nothing supernatural about it.

Jennifer, a divorced single mother of eight-year-old Cole, has parent pick-up on the very day some decidedly odd things take place in the office. When junior associate Gracie turns off the light and lowers the blackout shades in the meeting room, known as the Indigo Room (Sharon, the boss, has named all the meeting rooms after colours), Jennifer has an unreal, disturbing vision which turns out to be a premonition.

It was a strange premise, and I liked the story, but it wasn’t really scary. The style of writing, though nice, took some getting used to and pulled me out of the story. The ending was confusing, ending on an inconclusive note.

In the end, we don’t know why Sharon, the boss, called them all to the Blue Room.

+++++++++++++++

THE BLANKS by Grady Hendrix

This was a horror short story that touched me deeply as a parent.

Rachel and Stephen, and their children, Zoe ‘Zee’ and Callum, aged 14 and 11, residents of Brooklyn, escape every summer to Jeckle Island where they own a summer home. They have been doing so for 16 years. It’s always been fun until it isn’t.

The Island is home to the Blanks, otherworldly creatures you must never acknowledge or lock eyes with. If you look at a Blank, your life is over. They will come to get you. There is no escape from them. Once you lose a loved one to the Blanks, it’s as if they become tainted. No one wants to have anything to do with them.

But then one of their own stares at the Blanks. What would be the consequences of that action?

 

The horror, for me, lay in the fact that people continue to court disaster, despite knowing the danger they are exposing their loved ones to.

A reference to men’s ‘caveman compulsion’ tells us about the burden that Stephen will carry all his life, his inability to do anything. Particularly when fathering comes naturally to him.

The author does a marvel with an ironic foreshadowing when one of the kids insists that children should be allowed to vote because they are the ones who are going to live in the future.

+++++

 

NIGHT AND DAY IN MISERY by Catriona Ward

On the eighth anniversary of the deaths of her husband Frank and two-year-old son Sam, depressed and lonely Stella decides to kill herself at the very place where their deaths occurred. It’s a place in Missouri, a place that an unhappy local refers to as Misery.

Checking into the very room at the hotel where they last stayed, Stella prepares to jump into the river at the bottom of which the bodies of her husband and son were found. She blames herself for their deaths, for the liquor found in Frank’s blood.

For eight years, she has suffered, and now she hopes to join them, and find peace. But as she sleeps, on her last night, she has strange dreams that feel real, blurring the line between truth and the supernatural.

 

This story was beautiful, with a paranormal element. The writing was beautiful. Once again, I found myself hooked on the story, as a mother.

+++

LETTER SLOT by Owen King

Blake, the son of physically challenged and ailing single mother Wendy Price, is used to living a difficult life. But when he sees his mother in pain, yet forced to work two jobs, he is torn. Following up on a school assignment, he writes an anonymous letter, talking about his troubles, and drops it through the mail slot of an abandoned show house. He expects nothing to come of it, and is surprised when he finds a response to his letter, asking him to volunteer the name of one person he hates, in exchange for good fortune.

Blake succumbs to the temptation and is rewarded by good fortune. But the granting of his wishes only leaves him wanting more. And soon there will be a reckoning, particularly when Blake notices a horrible side effect to the granting of his wishes.

 

This story had an interesting premise, but it could have been a little tighter. Also, the ending felt a little tame. A reworking of the conclusion could have hit harder.

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.) 

Book Review: THE KEEPER OF THE KEY

Title: The Keeper of the Key

Author: Nicole Willson

Publisher: Parliament House Press

Pages: 286

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

 

Heed the Dead or Join Them, said the warning on the cover, and I braced myself for a good read.

When 16-year-old Rachel Morley’s mother, Tara, decides to accept boyfriend Geoff’s invitation to move into his mansion, Morgan House, in St Mary’s, Rachel feels uprooted. When they get to Morgan House, Rachel gets the creeps. She can’t help feeling that someone is watching her. Soon strange things begin to happen.  She feels a strange presence in the house and hears odd noises.

Her mother, eager to build a future with Geoff, hopes Rachel will settle. But that won’t be easy as Geoff has lots of rules, the strangest of which is that Rachel is never to go into the basement.

Luckily what makes her new town bearable is the presence of Nick Alexander, a good-looking guy who takes Rachel to the cemetery on their first date. Suddenly, the town of St Mary doesn’t feel so unbearable. The only trouble is that Morgan House seems more dangerous than ever. Each night she has horrible dreams about something evil in the basement, and a strangely familiar man whose face she can’t see, then wakes up to find herself in the basement, even though she doesn’t remember having gone there.

The book is written in the 1^st person present tense PoV of Rachel. The author creates a sense of dread. The eerie atmosphere weighs us down. The writing evokes the right imagery. The pace is good. Even though I guessed the source of the mystery, I still continued reading.

 

Geoff is a pain from the beginning, at least to Rachel. But he comes across as one-dimensional. Initially, there is nothing to redeem him in Rachel’s eyes.

The mother’s character could have been a little stronger. She doesn’t seem to have any agency of her own. She tells Rachel to give Morgan House a shot, and that if she doesn’t like it, they will leave. But then when Rachel expresses her misgivings, she still won’t move.

Another time, she tells Rachel that if she is not happy with Geoff’s proposal, she will decline. But then, she accepts the proposal. In both instances, Rachel settles down and makes peace with her decision. Which is a letdown, given her fierce desire to leave.

They don’t decide to leave until the very end. They should have at least made an attempt to leave.

Overall, I felt that there should have been more scenes with Rachel and her mother together, without Geoff around. We don’t get to see the mother-daughter dynamic enough. Also, Rachel mentions her father initially, but then halfway through the book, she comes to know something about her dad that she hadn’t known and that detail seemed forced. Having come to know of that fact, Rachel stops stressing over it, and doesn’t mention it again. This is strange, given that relationships play a huge part in this book.  

There were some things that weren’t clear.

Why was Rachel targeted? Just because she lived in the house?

What was the deal about the key in the title? Why does that key show up so late?

Rachel talks about another kind of ghost, when friendships fizzle out. I found this very sad. She knows that best friend, Elena, will soon forget her. On the other hand, Rachel herself forgets about Elena, once she meets Nick. 

 

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.) 

Book Review: ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE BLOCK ISLAND

Title: On A Clear Day You Can See Block Island  

Author: Gage Greenwood

Publisher: Tanner's Switch Publishing

Pages: 284

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

After the sudden death of his wife on account of corporate negligence, Jackson uses the compensation money from her company to move his children into a bigger house on Block Island. Wreath (17), Brian (15), Charlie (13), Chrissy (9) and Angela (8) are excited about the future even as they work through their complicated feelings of grief.

On their very first night in their new home, Wreath dies a horrible death, when she is literally eaten alive in her room by a monster.

Four years later, Jackson is an alcoholic mess. Brian lives out on the streets, addicted to drugs and opioids. Charlie, Chrissy and Angela are living with their aunt, Jackson’s sister, who isn’t much of a caregiver. But that’s not the worst of it. Charlie suffers from crippling anxiety. Chrissy has no memory of the monster that destroyed her family, while Angela has a terrible fear of being alone.

Chrissy questions her family’s insistence on clinging to the story. Then in a library book, she sees a picture of the monster and the blocked memories come rushing back at her.

 

The book is suffused with horror. Chrissy devours horror fiction. She has turned into ‘someone who would find peace in violent words.’ The author uses Chrissy’s interest in horror fiction to recommend some books. There’s also the horror of alcohol and drug addiction.

There were some lines from the book that stood out for me:

Horror wasn’t a spotlight on evil, it was control. If a person could create beautiful sentences from horrific events, then any person could weave their way through life’s trauma. You just have to make the grime shine.

Grief was a mysterious lump on your flesh . . .  One minute, you can convince yourself it’s benign, just an ugly little thing you can learn to deal with, and the next, you’re certain it’s the start of something bigger, the kind of thing that will eat away at your flesh, devour your bones.

A person can only fray for so long before they become nothing but loose strands.

 

The book cover was interesting, with the island, seemingly ordinary, and the lives that it has claimed, visible in the spilling of blood below the surface of the water.

The writing was masterful in the first part of the book, especially the first chapter, inviting the reader to stop speed reading to lavish upon the words the attention the author had devoted to crafting them. Through the first half of the book, we see the pain born of grief and trauma.

We feel a sense of sadness for the plight of this this suffering family. The challenges that batter the kids relentlessly make us feel protective towards them. 

The friendship that siblings Tiffany and Doug show to Charlie was sweet, and I felt bad that things didn’t turn out differently for them. Also why were they attacked?

 

But the second half of the book lost me. The first half definitely felt tighter than the second. And the action against the monsters took too long. Against it, the sibling dynamics was reduced to petty squabbles.

The chapters, alternating between Tiffany and Doug, Chrissy and Angela, and Detective Burns and Jackson, were essentially the same, with each pair facing off against the monster, and each pair coming to the same conclusion about their situation. My attention flagged at this point. It was almost like a sibling fight, with each pair hitting the monster, and being hit back in turn.

There was a hint about a weakness suffered by the monsters, but no explanation for why they have that weakness.

The character of Brian was explored briefly but not in a way that helped the plot along.  

The action vis-à-vis the monsters takes far too long. We can’t imagine how this part of the book will end. What scenario could possibly result in the destruction of such horrible monsters?

 

The climax and the resolution left me feeling dissatisfied. There was no good explanation about why the nightmare ended when it did or even how, and whether it would ever recur.

Some elements in the story didn’t make sense. Why did Angela have the visions about the monsters in the past?

It was surprising that the detailed flashback of Jackson’s wife comes at the 76 percent mark, almost like an afterthought or a force-fit, making it appear like an unplanned addition. Before that, we are told almost nothing about her, which is odd considering that it is her death that sets the plot going.

The relationship between the siblings felt incomplete. Other than the fact that most of them don’t get along with each other, I saw very little of the dynamics between the siblings or the family. The aunt that is apparently caring for Charlie, Chrissy and Angela isn’t even seen in the book.

The chapter titles were intriguing. They made no sense out of context and, at first glance, seemed rather random. It was only when one read the chapter that one could make sense of them.

 

I don’t enjoy monster horror, but I expected better from this because of the themes of grief and trauma that were woven through. But ultimately, this book didn’t work for me. 

 

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.) 

 

Book Review: LIZZIE

Title: Lizzie  

Author: Edward Rand

Publisher: Bloodchuckles Press

Pages: 594

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Dan and Beth move with their four-year-old daughter, Lizzie, to a large house in a rural area. They get the house for a steal, and the plan is that Dan, a real estate guy, will spruce up the house and then sell it for a profit.

All is well for the first seven months until one day when Dan finds himself lured to a deserted graveyard on a cycling trip on his birthday. This is the first time he sees Barron Cemetery. This seemingly harmless event invites their worst nightmare into their lives.

A series of unprovoked, bizarre and increasingly horrible incidents begin to plague them. They realise that the cops aren’t going to protect them, that the police are in fact in the employ of the criminals. What’s more, all their friends and neighbours might be involved too.

The book is divided into five parts: Book 1 – Animosity, Book 2 – The First Rule, Book 3 – Things That Should Not Be, Book 4 – Back to the Cemetery, Book 5 – The Binding and Book 6 – The Reaping. It is written in the third person past tense PoV of Dan and Beth.

The author did a good job with the description of the countryside, slowly building an aura of isolation and alarm. He also helps us understand character motivation through the internal monologue of other characters as much as through the dialogue and setting.

What I liked about the plot is that the action doesn’t let up, continuing long after one thinks that peace has been restored.

In the beginning, I didn’t like Beth much. Dan calling her a tigress once too often didn’t help matters much. It was only after the plot progressed further and they faced their biggest challenge yet that I began to warm towards them. Despite the anger they hold against each other, we get a sense of the deep love they have for each other. Both of them have had difficult pasts. Both have secrets they have hidden from each other and from us.

Dan and Beth are both richly layered characters. Both have meaty roles in this book. Both tend to act impulsively, and not always wisely,

Dan referring to Arabic as “the flowing script used by Al Jazeera whenever Al-Qaeda issued a proclamation in the name of their bloodthirsty god, usually after slaughtering a batch of innocent people,” was in bad taste. This issue is not as problematic when a minor character, with major prejudice, refers to “Muslim heathens” because then it fits her character.

There is a lot of swearing and bad language in the book, that I found distasteful. There were lots of descriptions of sex, written primarily like a male fantasy.  “He couldn’t go any deeper. There wasn’t room” sounded puerile.

One error was when Abdulla was referred to as a Sikh. Abdulla is not a Sikh name. It is a Muslim name. Get your facts right before forcing diversity into your story.

It’s a long book, but also a long nightmare. Even so, the book could have been thinner. A lot of it was in the internal monologues of the two main characters, especially with both of them dancing around the main issue.

I liked the book, but was disappointed with the conclusion. The only way in which it might make sense is if the author were to announce a sequel. Also, what was the point in calling this book, Lizzie, when most of it was about Dan and Beth?

 

 (I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.) 

Book Review: THAT NIGHT IN THE WOODS

Title: That Night in the Woods

Author: Kristopher Triana

Publisher: Cemetery Dance Publications

Pages: 336

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐

 

Of all the different kinds of horror stories, the slash-and-gore fest is the one I dislike the most. There seems to be no point to the violence, which intensifies, until it seems to head towards a deadly collision. It’s all a bit too overwhelming for my taste.

 

More than 25 years after high school, Scott Dwyer invites his old high school friends, Jenny, Tracy, Corey and Mark to his house in their old hometown to honour the memory of their old friend Steven who has died recently.

 

Something truly scary happened the last time they were all together in the woods behind Scott’s house, back in 1995 during Halloween. These woods were infamously called Suicide Woods, because a number of teenagers went into the woods and killed themselves.

 

Severely traumatized, the friends all fled town after high school, never returning until now. In all these years, they have had no contact with one another, never seen or spoken with another one of their friends, until now.

 

But this reunion is anything but innocent. The horror that terrorized them still awaits them. And this time it’s not about to let go.

 

 

The author brings us up to speed on the lives of Jenny, Tracy, Corey and Mark, in their early forties, as they face stagnation in their lives. It is clear that the thought of returning to their hometown scares them all for some reason, and yet their curiosity trumps their sense of reason.

 

Unfortunately, this update about each of these four characters comes over four long chapters, delaying the point at which the story actually starts. Also, what was the point in giving us all those details about the character’s personal lives, if it wasn’t going to matter at all except to let us know that they were all unhappy with their lives.

 

Even once they meet, the real point of the story takes a while to show up. The friends are too busy fantasizing about each other, and basically reverting to their teenage selves, forgetting that they should have evolved.

 

What the author says about places being haunted by the emotional impact of the deaths of the victims and of the feelings of the killers and those who survive the victims made sense.

 

The book needed to be proofread. There were lots of spelling and grammatical errors that could have been avoided. In describing Traci, the author uses the phrase, ‘extenuating those long legs,’ when he should have used the word, accentuating.

 

But some lines in the book were well written and stood out. Here’s a sample:

 

Blaming scary movies, heavy metal, video games, and gangster rap was just a pathetic effort to explain and understand human atrocity. If someone had murder in them, their influences were irrelevant. They would have gone on to kill, no matter what. Lust, greed, and politics were the true instigators.

 

Sometimes the mind forgets because it must do so to stay sane.

 

People say the beasts come out at night. But it’s not the night; it’s the darkness. Whether the darkness of the woods or the darkness of a movie theater—it’s all one. In darkness the evil things know they won’t be seen. In the shadows, they can do whatever they want to a little girl.

 

I plodded through this book, wishing it would end already, but only because I generally make it a point not to give up on a book. That Night in the Woods is the sort of book that might appeal to others. It just wasn’t for me. 

 

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.) 

Book Review: THE DUNNIE

Title: The Dunnie
Author: Keith Thomas
Publisher: Night Platform Book Company
Pages: 145
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

The Dunnie, a horrible and beastly creature, supposedly based on English-Scottish folklore, is a creature that personifies our worst habits. While the book makes for good reading as a tale of horror, it misses out on a deeper characterisation of Asher, his days at school, and his grief and rebelliousness.

Mary Schwob Arceneaux wakes up in the middle of one night in 2008 to discover that Frank, her husband, a man who has abused and belittled her for 24 years, is not in bed. When she goes looking for him in his favourite room, the library, she finds him engaged in a bizarre ritual with Terry ‘Goat’ Pratt, a man she detests as much as she detests Frank.

Fourteen years later, Frank has dementia and is losing control. His daughters, Zoe, with partner Faith, and Beth, with her 12-year-old son Asher, have returned home to help put his affairs in order.

Asher’s school has threatened to expel him over various infractions. Beth hopes that spending time with his grandfather and playing in the woods around their home will help calm him, and save him from inheriting the rage of his grandfather, once an abusive brute who mysteriously turned benevolent around the time of Asher’s birth.

Lonely and despised by his family, Frank underwent an occult practice to rid himself of his anger. The anger was expelled from his body and took the shape of an evil creature, the Dunnie, that needed to feed on small animals to stay alive.

Now the Dunnie has grown and her anger has increased and Asher's grandfather can no longer control the creature. Will Asher succeed in keeping his family safe?

 

Speaking of the curiosities in his grandfather’s collection, Asher says, “They’re not so bad,” to which Beth responds, “In the daytime, they’re not.”

Another time, when Asher says, “Pa never really seemed to care much about money,” Beth says, “When you’ve got enough of it, you don’t.”

 

In the best traditions of the horror genre, we are moved to care for Asher, who is hurting and misunderstood. In the same vein, Beth disregards Asher when he sounds the voice of alarm

 

Asher gets into trouble at school. He is unable to process his grief in the wake of his father’s death. We are not told who his father is, or how he died, which is a big omission in the family’s back story. Clearly it’s important, since Asher is unable to cope at school.

 

Since so much of the story hinges on Frank’s anger issues and his belittling of his wife and children, it would have been great to actually see that angry display of rage, set against the vision of the lovely grandfather that Asher knows. Both these significant personality changes are only told to us, never shown.

 

Also, Mary is missing from the present-day events. We learn much later that she has died. Again, an omission. Since she was the one to bear witness to the strange ritual that changes Frank, she should have been around to experience this difficult time.

Mary had the makings of a good character.

 

In fact, after Mary’s death, none of the living female characters are strong enough. It is only the men who make things happen, including Frank, Asher, Goat, the strawman.

 

Apparently Frank attaches as little importance to women. Why else would he burden a 12-year-old boy with information about the Dunnie? Such a serious matter should have been shared with his two adult daughters and yet when Asher asks him why he won’t tell his mom and aunt Zoe and the police, Frank says the police would not believe him. He has nothing to say about Beth and Zoe.

Ironically, the Dunnie, the beast of a monster goes by the pronouns she and her.

 

I liked the writing, especially the bits about the house and Goat’s house and the strawman. In fact, I found the strawman scarier than the DUnnie.

 

The Dunnie was a great horror novel, but I would have liked it to go beyond. The issues relating to anger, grief, domestic abuse, dementia, even the soul and its significance, remain unaddressed.

 

The book also includes an excerpt from the author’s next book in the series, The Mutter.

Stories need to be dangerous, Pa tells Asher. This one certainly is.

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.) 

Book Review: ONE EYE OPEN

Title: One Eye Open
Author: Alex Grecian
Illustrator: Andrea Mutti
Publisher: TKO Studios
Pages: 100
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

 

One Eye Open by Alex Grecian reminded me of The Monkey’s Paw by WW Jacobs. Their basic ideas were pretty similar.

Charlotte Jessen dies under mysterious circumstances, killed perhaps by her husband of 42 years, Tor. Her daughter, Laura Roux, returns to her childhood home with her teenage daughter, Juniper, two days after her mother’s funeral. The mother and daughter are recovering from a tragedy. Laura’s husband, Jacob, was killed in a tragic accident while attempting to teach Juniper how to drive.

They are here for good, although Juniper doesn’t know it initially. Laura hopes this will be their new beginning.

But Juniper is not happy with having to move to this small village in Denmark, away from her life in the US. To make things worse, she finds the townsfolk rather odd, every one of them behaving suspiciously.

Then Juniper comes to know of a horrible tradition that has prevailed over centuries. One that arose out of the need to ensure that there are enough hands to reap the harvest that the endless wheat fields in the village are blessed with.

But that’s the thing about tradition. It has to be repeated.

 

The book is written in the third person limited PoV of Laura, Juniper and Kaspar.

This was my first attempt at reading horror. It was disturbing but so well written that I just kept on reading. Who would have thought something as innocuous as wheat fields could induce a feeling of discomfort and horror? But the author has done it.

He has created the image of an insular community, holding dangerous secrets that have the power to turn against the community.

Most prologues are completely unnecessary, but here, the Prologue hitches us in, creating the right mix of intrigue and dread. Very quickly, we realise that something is terribly wrong.

Nine of the chapters began with beautiful watercolour illustrations that set its characters deeper in our minds. Of course, to be honest, I didn’t need the illustrations. My own imagination was doing a pretty good job of throwing up images to upset me. Having said that, I must say the illustrations were superb and added to the impact created by the book.

The writing was good, and the issues that it discussed, death, grief and loss are such as to resonate with all of us, particularly when the loss has been a sudden one. The accident which caused the death of Jacob was painful to read. We can relate to the pain of the mother and daughter.

Just one mistake, in Chapter 9, Kaspar turned into Konrad.

I couldn’t quite understand the title, One Eye Open. Perhaps it refers to the warning, Sleep with one eye open.

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.) 

Book Review: WHISPERS AND SCREAMS

Title: Whispers and Screams
Author: Kerri Lapierre and Nadia Teoli
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 66
My Goodreads rating: ⭐⭐

This book, with 13 stories of horror, promised to be one terrifying read. It was anything but.

The presentation needed improvement. The names of the stories were only mentioned in the Contents. The stories themselves were separated by images, but there was no mention of the names of the stories.

The stories were badly written. Tenses changed arbitrarily within paragraphs and even sentences. In one story, a sound is described as being too ornate to be made by the wind. Another sound is described as being ‘soft and quiet like a nursery rhyme.’

All the stories end abruptly. Short stories don’t allow room for much character development, but here, stories end before they even begin.

Come Closer was the only story that I thought could have turned out better if more effort had been put into it. The rest of them are all developments of banal ideas that you have read better versions of in other places.

Of course, the collection isn’t meant for grownups. But even my teenage daughter, who loves RL Stine, found the stories weak, unable to even create an atmosphere of foreboding.

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.) 

Book Review: THE NEIGHBOR

Title: The Neighbor
Author: London Clarke
Publisher: Carfax Abbey

Pages: 326

Goodreads rating: ⭐⭐⭐

Claire Vogel is a divorced mother of four girls who has a secret. A therapist, she likes to live on the wild side, stepping back just before she might tip over the edge. When she begins a flirtation with sexy, new neighbour Steel Nolan, odd things start happening around the house.

Before long, there is an unexpected murder-suicide in a family in the neighbourhood, and Annalen, her oldest, begins to suffer blackouts. Youngest daughter Paris expresses a vehement dislike towards Steel.

Meanwhile, one of Claire’s patients claims to be living a life that is a mirror image of her own, down to the smallest details. The woman even claims to be seeing a guy called Steel Nolan.

At first, Claire wonders if Steel is two-timing but then she gives in to his seduction and sleeps with him. It is the beginning of the worst nightmare of her life. Creepy things began to happen, with stuffed toys moving around, and her own children behaving as if they are possessed.

Then there is a creepy website that shows you your worst secrets and horrors from your past, things you cannot un-see.

Will Claire succeed in saving herself and her family?

 

The mood is deliciously slow, the details building up to give the book the vibe of a paranormal thriller.

There’s a minor subplot about her ex-husband, Gunnar, who has moved on and is married, and about the children’s interactions with her. This element led me to think that it might be a domestic thriller, but thankfully, it wasn’t so. The focus remains on the house, and what transpires within. Is it haunted? The author does a fantastic job of keeping us looking over our shoulders to see if ordinary objects around us have turned sinister.

 

I wish the author had given Claire two daughters less. Except for Annalen and Paris, the other two don’t get much space in the book, and I don’t see why they had to even be there. I couldn’t even remember their names.

To her credit, the supposed desire to live on the wild side doesn’t really show up much. I couldn’t see what the big deal was about it. For the most part, Claire is a sensible woman, genuinely loving towards her children and determined to keep them safe. I felt sorry for her. All she was trying to do was move on the way Gunnar had. Why does it always backfire on women?

Of course, she does behave in classic horror movie character style when it seems her instincts have gone to sleep and she doesn’t listen to her kids. If this element had not been there, the book would have been tighter and a few pages lighter. The climax requires us to suspend our disbelief and felt forced.

The Korean neighbour and her mother-in-law bring in a touch of Korean folklore which resonates within the novel, reminding us that stories from different cultures are more similar than we realise.

 

Annalen is nearing 15, yet she seems remarkably naïve. She catches her mother getting out of Steel’s truck, smoothing her dress down, and asks her, without a trace of sarcasm, what she was doing in there. How unbelievable is that!

Towards the end, when the horror element takes us out of reality and into the unreal, forcing us to confront the primal issue of Good versus Evil, we really begin to root for Claire as we wonder if there could ever be hope for her.

 

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.) 

Book Review: HOLD MY PLACE

Title: Hold My Place

Author: Cassondra Windwalkerl

Pages: 256

Publisher: Black Spot Books

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

Hold My Place was a book that fell short of its creepy potential. I expected it to be twisty, and it was to an extent, but it still left me feeling dissatisfied.

Sigrun is a librarian who becomes totally besotted with a sophisticated chef, Edgar Leyward. She signs up for cooking classes at his restaurant. Edgar too, it appears, reciprocates her feelings, and treats her with greater attention, but does not initiate any physical intimacy. He makes it clear that he is a married man and that he is deeply in love with Octavia, his wife.

When Octavia dies of Covid, Sigrun is anxious to comfort Edgar and make sure that he doesn’t give in to his grief. She moves into his life and his home. They get married just six weeks later.

One day, Sigrun, looking through his study, discovers the shrine he has made to all his loves. She comes to know that Octavia was not his first wife, nor the first loved one he has lost. Before Octavia, he was married to Brigitte, who died of breast cancer, and before that, he was engaged to Devlin, who died of a fall while they were on a trek. All three women had untimely and early deaths.

Edgar shares the letters that all three women had written to him. Sigrun begins to read Octavia’s letters, then Brigitte’s and lastly, Devlin’s, hoping to better understand Edgar. While the handwriting naturally differs, Sigrun comes to know of some disturbing similarities between the letters.

While the similarity of thoughts and ideas evokes a mild sense of alarm, Sigrun finds her own personality strangely altering, drifting away into that of another woman. The tug is almost hypnotic. Until some words in Devlin’s letter wake her up to the harsh truth. And if one day our spell seems to have lost its power, I’ll find another door to the room where you are. Nothing, certainly not anything so common and crass as death, will ever divide us.

 

The book is written mostly in the first person past tense of Sigrun. While the first person PoV allows us to get to know a character intimately, the author spent too long acquainting Sigrun with the three women in Edgar’s life. Too much time was spent on the build-up of the letters.

The story had the potential to be really creepy but none of it came through. The promise of the blurb came about after far too long, and was left mostly unexplored.

 

The near-constant rain and the vague sense of menace created a sense of impending gloom. Just when it feels like something that might be better suited to a time in the past, the author roots the book in today’s times by telling us that The horror story of our age had already begun… A new sickness ravaging the east. But with our typical blithe American arrogance… we assumed it would never reach us. There is a lengthy bit about Covid that spells too-much-information about something we know all too well, and loosened the grip on the story somewhat. I suppose the author was trying to juxtapose the tumult in her own life against the tumult and confusion that the coronavirus brought in its wake.

While the commentary about Covid was written in beautiful prose, the author should have “killed” her darlings, since the horror of Covid detracted from the horror of the story.

 

It is clear that there is something forbidding about Edgar. His love for the women in his life is all-encompassing, yet it somehow seems unreal. The affair feels, to Sigrun, inexorable, darker than blood, swifter than thought, colder than a corpse.

Edgar is described as handsome and elegant, and Sigrun is totally enamoured, but the man was still uninteresting to me.

Did I like Sigrun? No. There just wasn’t enough to like. Heavily tattooed and goth in her choice of clothing and makeup, Sigrun is a mass of contradictions and far from the image of the stereotypical mousy librarian.

She tells us that she loves to read paranormal romances. We never actually see her reading them. She should have been fleshed out better. Nor did I like Edgar or the other women. None of them were real. The only person I liked, and not too much at that, was Evan. But he didn’t occupy too much space in the book.

 

 

I found it odd that other than Octavia, none of the characters were endowed with surnames. It made the characters feel unsubstantial. Edgar’s surname, Leyward, is actually Octavia’s. Of course, we couldn’t be sure about it. In Chapters 1, 3, 4 and 5, there were a total of six references to the name, Leyward. In Chapter 9, the name changed to Leyman.

The restaurant where Edgar is a chef, serving French-Asian cuisine, is called La Table in ten places, and then La Place in three places.

There were other errors. One character says, “We all metamorphosize, don’t we?” That word should have been metamorphose. One of Evan’s five texts to Sigrun sounds as if it were written by her.

 

The pace was too slow. We spend a lot of time reading the letters written by the three women, and I got the feeling that the author deliberately drowned us in those letters, while not letting us know enough about what was happening between Sigrun and Edgar.

As late as the 82 percent mark, things were still okay for Sigrun. The sense of alarm had not become clear, and she wasn’t in any physical danger yet. The only danger was that she was caught up in the myth of Edgar, and was willing to lose herself to be his love for ever.

The first sign of real fear shows up only at the 86 percent mark. At the 91 percent mark, we see the first traces of what the blurb had warned us about, but it’s neither scary nor impressive. The book takes far too long to deliver on its promise, and when it does, it’s wrapped up so swiftly that we don’t know what hit us. Sure, there’s a twist, a weird one, one that I didn’t expect after the Prologue, but there’s no time to process it at all. 

(I read this book through NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley)