Debut novel from Brendan Duffy is Beautiful and Unsettling.

April 14 New Release

I may as well confess. I love being scared. It's exhilarating. But not a lot scares me. I have to believe it could happen to me. That the horror is real. In House of Echoes,  Brendan Duffy has written my kind of story. 

Ben Tierney travels to upstate New York to settle his grandmother's estate. While he was out viewing the ramshackle home, he spots The Crofts- a grand home settled in between two mountains on a thousand acres overlooking the town of Swannhaven. And it's for sale. 

Ben immediately thinks of the possibilities.  The place could be a magnificent inn. He can work on his stalled novel, maybe get some ideas from the area. Claudia can focus on renovations instead of  her failed bank and struggles with Bipolar Disorder.  Charlie will have a safe place to play, an important thing for the bullied eight year old. It's a great plan. But The Crofts and Swannhaven are much more than they appear.

 As Ben uncovers the tragic history of the town, he scraps his unfinished novel and starts a new one. The story of the Swanns, the founding family of Swannhaven. There's a big story there, but one piece of it eludes him and he's getting the feeling that it's not only important to his novel, but to his family. Ben Teirney is descended from one of The Winter Families, which is a very big deal in Swannhaven. What it means to him and his family, Ben doesn't know.

The setting of the story may be the best character in the book. Duffy slowly but surely builds a perfect picture of impending doom. The partially renovated grand estate, a mysterious presence in the deep woods,fires, a nor'easter that dumps two feet of snow and closes the road to The Crofts. Nothing missing, nothing extra, just right.

This novel has the usual Gothic setting and themes, but the naive and beautiful young girl lured into a dangerous liaison with evil has been replaced by - I shouldn't say. Spoilers, you know. 

I give Duffy's debut novel 5 stars, for a beautifully written horror/suspense novel that  impressed me with its plausibility. By the end, I had forgotten the Tierney's weren't real people. I was afraid for them, afraid of Swannhaven. At the end of the novel, I thought back to it's first lines:

            "It is over now, sister, but for how long?"


I wonder that, too.

Thank you NetGalley and Random House/Ballantine for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

New Teen Horror Release

5 stars

In Daryl Gregory's We Are All Completely Fine, we met Harrison Harrison, a man touched by The Other. It was dark and left me hungry for more Harrison.   In Harrison Squared,  we meet Harrison Harrison the boy. Definitely Lovecraftian in setting and style, but not an adult novel. I would classify it as preteen. Very high quality preteen, and I enjoyed reading it.

Harrison's horror begins when his mother, a research scientist, takes him to Dunnsmouth for a project.  I keep wanting to write Innsmouth or Dunwich, which is to say this town is as insane as anything Lovecraft dreamed up. Everything about this place is creepy. Harrison's new school, his new classmates, the police, the fishermen, are all seriously weird. There's a secret under life that Harrison can't stop poking.

When his mother's boat doesn't return from her second day out, Aunt Sel swoops in to take care of Harrison until he gives up looking for his mother. In any other tale, Aunt Sel would be the crazy one. Here, she's the closest thing to normal Harrison's got.

Harrison's search for his mom is exciting and scary, but again, entirely appropriate for the young reader. There's never a lull in the adventure. It's classic Lovecraft, with ancient evil creatures from beyond the veil, caves and underwater rescues,  everything happening at night. Harrison has to rely on his own wits, and help eventually comes from strange places. Twelve year old me would have read this book over and over again, and pushed it on my friends.

I'm still hungry for more of the grown up Harrison Harrison, though.  (Hint, hint Gregory).

Thank you NetGalley and Tor Books for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Review: The Three

The Three by Sarah Lotz

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



I'm torn between giving this book two stars or three. While the overall message was something I agree with, it certainly took a long time getting there.

The basic storyline is that four plane crashes occur on the same day, scattered around the globe, and three children miraculously survive. Their survival becomes fodder for religious wingnuts and conspiracy theorists around the world.

Things I liked:

The epistolary format - Written in the form of interviews, emails, news articles, letters, etc. I've always like this style, but I this time the content was a little slow moving the story along.

The message - I can't say what anyone else got out of it, but what I got out of it basically agrees with some of my strongest beliefs. The masses are easily led by the media, with fear being the strongest emotion that draws people together. There's more, of course, but I don't want to give too much away.

Things I didn't like:

The pacing - It dragged. I kept reading because I thought, mistakenly, that surely something dramatic would eventually happen. I can imagine that this started out as a top-notch short story or novella that was expanded into a novel. At 476 pages, it's a pretty long horror novel where nothing singularly horrible happens. The horror is in the possibilities and eventualities.

The missed opportunity - This novel could have been a lot more. It could have been truly horrible, but the way I imagine that would preclude the epistolary format, probably. I imagine it with a bit of backstory, more action in the present, and moving further into the future. That's a story I would love to read.

I did finish it, but I wish I had spent those 476 pages on something else.







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Review: Infected

Infected by Scott Sigler

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's a great blend of science fiction and horror.

Apparently normal people start going psychotic, murdering family or friends before mutilating and killing themselves, and their autopsies reveal previously unseen physiological changes. Soon the CIA and the CDC are involved in a secret mission to uncover what's happening.

Is it a human-engineered biological weapon? A naturally occurring parasite that's mutated to its current form? Or is it something more sinister?

The mission to locate and capture a living victim is a roller coaster ride that has just the right amount of scientific and military jargon to give it believability. Three-dimensional characters have just enough personality to engage the reader without bogging it down.

Parasite victim Perry's journey is nothing less than horrific. His physical and psychological struggle are equally gut-wrenching. I was so caught up in his experience that I didn't want the CIA to find him. I wanted to ride it out with him, even if it placed the mission in danger of failure.

I can't recommend it highly enough for lovers of sci-fi/horror cross-overs. The next book in the series, Contagious (Infected #2) has just moved up my TBR list.



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