REVIEW: Harrow Lake by Kat Ellis

I have to be honest, it was the cover of Harrow Lake by Kat Ellis that had me intrigued.  I saw it on Netgalley and horror isn't really my jam but I was too tempted to pass this one by.  And you know what? It's become one of my biggest reading surprises of the year.

Harrow Lake has such a fantastic old-school horror film vibe to it.  Small town, old fashioned clothing, the creepiness in everyday items and places.  There's such a low-key creep factor to it that really builds throughout.  Despite it not being my usual reading material I found it really easy to fall into the story and into these characters.

Harrow Lake is a pretty unsettling place.  A small town that has been cut off from everything, not updated for decades and obsessed with the horror film that was filmed there and that made the town famous.  Our main character is Lola, who is the daughter of the film director who chose Harrow Lake as his film's setting and it's where her parents met, on set. 

But her mum has disappeared and when her dad is brutally attacked, Lola is sent to Harrow Lake to stay with her grandmother in this town that has not moved on.  I kind of loved how Lola doesn't really know who to trust or what to make of her grandmother and those she meets in Harrow Lake.  The jitterbugs in her mum's old room, the puppet in the town's museum, the abandoned sets used for the film all add different layers to how unsettling the book is.  I read bits of the Bone Tree out to my family and they were all suitably horrified.

I think my favourite thing about Harrow Lake, aside from how easily entertaining it is, is that it digs deeper than I was expecting into the buried secrets of their family, into those unanswered questions at the heart of Lola's and Harrow Lake's story.  And for that, I found this book utterly fascinating. 

Just, you know, keep an eye out - Mr. Jitters is coming.

REVIEW: Flesh and Blood by Simon Cheshire

I really enjoyed Flesh and Blood by Simon Cheshire. It had just enough levels of creepiness and unease throughout for me to remain really hooked on the story and wondering what would happen next?

Flesh and Blood reads like a thriller as the main character, Sam, is this teenage boy who moves into a new neighbourhood and is keen to flex his burgeoning journalistic muscles by investigating and writing an article about the dead body that has appeared in the area.  As he begins to ask questions, he begins to piece together this rather odd and ...unsettling series of events that possibly relate back to his next door neighbour. 

Honestly, I really liked this book.  I like Sam and the ways in which he goes after this story, how he writes about his experiences with some measure of hindsight.  I found his new friends to be entertaining, his crush on the prettiest girl in school, Emma, was rather entertaining. 

But ultimately this is a horror story.  And as I was reading this, I feel like the levels of creepiness was rather subtle in the beginning and it just built over time.  Dead bodies, creepy old houses, strange sounds in the night.  But also this feeling of powerlessness as the adults in this story seem a little zombie-fied of no control of their own which leaves poor Sam and his friends fighting against something big and terrible and really rather scary. I loved the medical elements included in the horror and I'm really just pleasantly surprised by how much this story got under my skin. 

If you're looking for a creepy scary read around Halloween I really recommend this book and the entire series of Red Eye titles!

REVIEW: The Haunting by Alex Bell

The Haunting by Alex Bell has a really interesting concept.  I love the idea of a cursed Cornish inn, the idea that it ties into witches and a witch's curse and that the main character comes back into the story 7 years after being injured in an accident at the inn.  However, The Haunting never quite lived up the chills promised from such an intriguing premise.

The setting of this book is The Waterwitch, a Cornish inn that is made from the salvaged timber of a cursed shipwrecked boat.  Our main character is Emma, she's 17 and is in a wheelchair after an accident at the inn occurs when she's 10.  Her family moved away and she's never been back to The Waterwitch.  That is, until her nan, who owns the inn, falls ill and Emma chooses to spend her half term break visiting her grandmother and reacquainting herself with The Waterwitch and also with her old best friend, Jem, and his younger sister, Shell. Ghosts and hauntings ensue.

I think part of the problem for me with The Haunting is that we have a high level of creep factor already.  We've got this creepy inn, an interesting back story and characters with complicated relationships that should provide plenty of tension.  However, I was a bit let-down with the ways in which Emma and Jem interacted with each other.  In that, they barely interacted with each other, despite having what could have been an intense meeting fraught with guilt on Jem's part in his role in Emma's disability or with longing and nostalgia for what they had as a friendship as children? But they had very little to do with each other throughout the story and it was such a disappointment.  And while my expectations we're set that high for the horror or scary elements to the story, I didn't think it was ever realised for me.  I think perhaps the story and build-up towards a frightening ending were just a little bit too subtle for me.

What I did love about the book is Emma's relationship with her guide dog, Bailey and it's Emma and Bailey that I felt provided the emotional heart to the story. I just wish a little bit more was done with the relationships in the story and also with the elements of the paranormal.

Extract: Dark Room by Tom Becker #RedEye

Have you guys heard of the Red Eye series of YA horror books from Stripes Publishing? I've been a huge fan of these books this year. I love the range of topics and the way in which these books scare in very different ways. I'm not a massive reader of horror stories but I feel like it's always fun to dip into a genre that I don't read every now and again just to shake things up with my reading.

And I just really love this series so far. As I said, there are different authors, different approaches, different topics. But all with these great, scary stories. The latest that's been published is Dark Room by Tom Becker. I have started reading it and what I have read I've really enjoyed but other things are going on right now which is why I haven't quite finished it. I will share with you the product description and also a fab extract to give you a good taste of what this book is like! Hope you enjoy.

When Darla and her feckless dad, Hopper, move to Saffron Hills, Darla hopes it'll be a new start for the both of them. But she stands no chance of fitting in with the image-obsessed in-crowd at her new school. Then one of her classmates is brutally killed when taking a photo of herself. A murder Darla herself predicted in a bloody vision. When more teens die in a similar fashion it appears that a serial killer is on the loose - the 'Selfie Slayer'. Darla alone is convinced that the murderer might not be flesh and blood...

Dark Room by Tom Becker Extract

As Darla stared at the paintings, the bell above the gallery door rang out again.

“Annie?” Darla called out. “Is that you?”

No reply.

Darla peered around the dividing wall back towards the front of the gallery, but there was no one there. Maybe whoever it was had seen there was no one behind the counter and left. Or maybe whoever it was just didn’t want Darla to see them.

“Hello?” she said. “Is anybody there?”

The lights went out, plunging the gallery into darkness.

Darla froze, waiting to hear someone’s voice call out. But no sound disturbed the shadows. Lights went out all the time, she told herself, it didn’t have to mean that something was wrong. So why was her heart racing in her chest? Darla slipped into the adjoining alcove only to be confronted by the mirror Annie had shattered. Tiny fragments of her own face stared back at her.

As Darla looked into the broken glass, she felt herself being swallowed up by a mind that wasn’t her own. She was transported from one darkened room to another, where a girl with bright blond hair and a white tank top was slumped lifelessly in a chair. Her head was bowed, hiding her face. She let out a groan of pain, and Darla looked down and saw a knife in her own hand, blood on its blade…

A sudden sound wrenched her back to the present. Footsteps, soft as a breath. There was someone in the gallery with Darla. And they were trying very hard not to be heard. Had the person watching her in the mall followed her here? What did they want with her?

“Annie,” Darla whispered to herself. “Where are you?”

The footsteps were drawing nearer. Darla edged along the wall, drawing further back into the gallery. In the next alcove, the oversize doll’s house sat in the middle of the room. Darla crept over to it and opened up the front, pulling her knees up to her chest and squashing herself inside. In the darkness it would be almost impossible to see her without looking closely through one of the windows. It would have to be enough.

Darla waited. Seconds stretched out into minutes. The gallery remained silent.

And then she heard a floorboard creak.

Peering out through the dollhouse window Darla could just make out a figure moving stealthily around the alcove, little more than a shadowy outline in the darkness. With careful, even steps they circled the dollhouse. A hunter’s stealthy tread.

REVIEW: Sleepless by Lou Morgan and Frozen Charlotte by Alex Bell

This year Stripes is launching a new YA horror series under the name Red Eye. There will be four titles published throughout the year and I have been very lucky to have been sent the first two launch titles to read and review: Sleepless by Lou Morgan and Frozen Charlotte by Alex Bell.

I'm not a huge reader of horror stories but I was quite intrigued by this new series of books and I jumped into them both really hoping and expecting for some creepy, scary things to happen! I wasn't disappointed.

Sleepless by Lou Morgan

First up, I read Sleepless by Lou Morgan. This is a story about Izzy and her group of friends.  They're all rich and pretty and they all live in or near the Barbican Centre and attend this swank private school, Clerkenwell.  At Clerkenwell, exams matter. They're super important and in fact, failure is not an option.

So when Tigs gives everyone a seemingly perfect solution to their problem, Izzy and her friends all jump at the chance. Tigs has found these special pills which enhance memory and really allows for more concentration and focus during revisions and exams.  And everything seems to be going so well until after the exams when creepy things start happening and Izzy and her friends start seeing and hearing things and start to question: what actually were in those pills? And the realisation that they all come to? There are worse things to happen to them besides failing an exam.

While I thought that Sleepless was a little slow to get into and I never fully connected to the majority of the central cast of characters, I also found this book to have some really creepy and tense situations and I found myself a little uncomfortable reading this book alone and in the dark.  I loved that this book is set in London, specifically at the Barbican Centre where I've been quite a few times.  Having a familiar setting made things more real in my head and I loved the addition of other scary places: a hospital, a building site, a meat market.  Even the Barbican with its confusing stairwells and passageways was a brilliant setting choice for this story.

In terms of horror, I was pleasantly surprised by where the story went.  Some of these teenagers do die and in horrific ways.  But the build-up to the gruesome scenes was quite chilling in parts as well as the characters start to question their own grasp on reality and I always love to see a group of characters turn on each other as their trust and camaraderie are shaken by rather shocking events.

I quite liked this story.  It did need a tighter edit, particularly in the first quarter of the book, but overall an interesting idea that certainly gave me the creeps!

Frozen Charlotte by Alex Bell

Next, I picked up Frozen by Alex Bell.  I did initially slightly put off reading this book because I find the very idea of haunted porcelain dolls to be super terrifying and this cover constantly looks like it's watching and following me as I was reading this book!  But I did gather enough courage to read this book and I really liked it.  Again, I didn't think it was overly scary but it definitely had some really unsettling and disturbing scenes within it that made me uncomfortable at times!  Especially as I was mostly reading it alone and at night in my creaky house.

Frozen Charlotte is mostly set on the Scottish island, Skye, in kind of a remote old Victorian school house.  As with Sleepless, I thought the setting of this book really leant itself to a horror novel.  I loved the idea of this island cut off from the mainland by bad weather and cancelled ferries and also this school house converted into a family home, especially as it is littered with so much history from its days of being a school - including a large collection of porcelain dolls.  Plus, together with a Ouija board, ghostly sightings, unexplained fires and accidents and you have yourself quite the creepy story.

This story revolves around our main character, Sophie, who comes to stay with her cousins over the summer.  She's recently suffered a big loss with her best friend dying in an accident and she comes to stay with this family she doesn't really know very well who have also had their fair share of loss.  And Sophie's relatives are a family with a complicated family dynamic! I really liked that about this book as people aren't what they seem and everyone's behaviour has changed due to the evil intentions of these supposedly haunted porcelain dolls.

Throughout most of the book Sophie is searching for answers to her best friend's death which she thinks is connected to the death of her cousin, Rebecca, a few years back.  While this puts Sophie in dangerous situations at time, I felt like it fit with Sophie's character and I quite liked seeing how this mystery unravelled.

I thought Frozen Charlotte had a very cinematic feel to it.  I could quite easily picture the events of this book as a horror film and towards the second half of the book, when Sophie realises the extent of one character's intentions towards her I could feel Sophie's helplessness and frustration in this situation.  I thought it was really good!

After reading these two creepy and unsettling books, however, I will definitely need to surround myself with some lighter, fluffier reads!

REVIEW: Say Her Name by James Dawson

I was quite pleasantly surprised by Say Her Name by James Dawson. I'll admit, I did go into this book hoping that it would scare the pants off me and while it didn't quite reach that level for me, I did find Say Her Name consistently and, at times, uncomfortably creepy.  I loved that there was this thread of unease that really built up throughout the story and that there felt like quite a bit of tension.  Plus? I absolutely love the cover.

Say Her Name is the story of Bloody Mary and how the legend of this ghost manifests itself in the lives of a group of teenagers at a boarding school.  It all starts off as a bit of a joke at a Halloween party, when our main character, Bobbie, her room mate, Naya, and a local boy, Caine, end up in front of a mirror invoking Bloody Mary's name. Nothing happens immediately however, unfortunately for the three characters in Say Her Name, that isn't where the story ends.  Things start happening.  Nightmares, scary reflections in mirrors ...and then more.  There's a race against time for these three characters to find out what they can about Mary and this curse in order to save themselves.

I think my favourite aspect of this story is how much I came to care about the characters. Bobbie is a wonderful main character. I think she's funny and witty and has the best dialogue throughout the story.  I liked her relationship with her room mate, Naya, and how they interacted with each other.  And I also really liked Caine as a love interest, especially with how lacking in confidence Bobbie is to believe anything could happen.  But I think the thing I loved the most is what these three characters come to find out, in their search for answers, about Mary's past and how this curse came about. I think it could have been quite easy to not give Mary a back story but I found myself feeling a little bit sorry for Mary's character and I think that made this story a lot more interesting for me.

It also had lots of elements of scariness and horror.  I did read parts of this book late at night, in bed, alone and I found myself succumbing to some of the creepiness, especially with the elements of water and reflections.  My only complaint with the book is that I would have liked the ending to have gone in a different direction. I felt like the conclusion of the book took something away from what the author did with the Mary's back story and motivation.

REVIEW: The Dead by David Gatward

Lazarus Stone is about to turn sixteen when, one night, his normal life is ripped to shreds by a skinless figure drenched in blood. He has a message:

The Dead are coming.

Now Lazarus is all that stands in their way. To fulfil his destiny, he must confront not only the dark past of his family, but horrors more gruesome than even Hell could invent. And it all begins with the reek of rotting flesh ...

A big thank you to Waterstones for sending this new horror book for me to review. I don't read much YA horror books, but I really should. And I think that I will very soon, as The Dead is the first in a new series of books by David Gatward.

It follows Lazarus Stone, nearly 16, as he learns some very surprising things one night as this really creepy and horrific thing appears in his house and tells Lazarus that unless something happens very quickly, a torrent of angry demons will start ripping through the veil that separates Lazarus's normal life from The Dead. Didn't you just get chills just reading that synopsis? I did.

The book is quite short, but action-packed. Lazarus and his best mate, Craig are on a mission to find some answers. Specifically to find out about these demon-visits and the dead, but also, what has happened to Lazarus's dad?! What I loved about The Dead is that it isn't all one big gore-fest. Yes, it is gorey and some gruesome things do happen, but it also seemed to really concentrate on this idea that Lazarus has no idea who his father is. It's so easy to scratch our parents off as being nothing but parents and Lazarus really has his eyes opened to the fact that his father in particular is very a different person to who he thought he was. Maybe all of our parents are.

The horror aspects of the book were done well. I was sufficiently creeped out and I really would not recommend reading this book late at night, or on your own. There's a scene in a hospital that I would like removed from my brain because everytime I think of it, I am a little bit afraid.

REVIEW: The Enemy by Charlie Higson

Wow. I finished this book last night and I'm left almost speechless by it. It isn't what I was expecting and in a really good way. Charlie Higson, author of the Young Bond series (which I've loved up to a point), has gone in a different direction with The Enemy. He's taken on zombies. Zombies are all the rage at the moment, but I can't say that I've had much experience with them, either in books or movies. So this is a new one for me. Here's the description on Amazon:

They'll chase you. They'll rip you open. They'll feed on you...When the sickness came, every parent, policeman, politician - every adult - fell ill. The lucky ones died. The others are crazed, confused and hungry. Only children under fourteen remain, and they're fighting to survive. Now there are rumours of a safe place to hide. And so a gang of children begin their quest across London, where all through the city - down alleyways, in deserted houses, underground - the grown-ups lie in wait. But can they make it there - alive?

I'm a little queasy when it comes to horror. I generally avoid it. And my assumption that because this book is aimed at a young adult audience that it would be watered-down, less horrific was entirely false. Higson does not hold back on the scary. It's fast-paced and very thrilling. But it's also very gory. Kids die. They get eaten, dragged away or attacked by dogs. Bad things happen and nobody is safe.

And in this very horrific new world these kids are living in, there's also some humanity left. The book focuses around a group of kids who have made their home in a Waitrose in North London. They try to protect the little ones, they try to maintain this sense of what's right and what's wrong. They struggle with the responsibilities of leadership, and their guilt when things go wrong. There's some great dialogue here and you really get a sense of who these characters are and where they are coming from. When a new kid comes along telling these kids about a safe place, they must figure out who to trust and how to work together. Meanwhile, the grown-ups are organising themselves, getting smarter and stronger...

It's the first in an exciting new series, and I cannot wait for the rest.