My thoughts:
Here's one SCARY tale for you, horror at its creepy shivery best.
Wow, this is a fabulous, scary, menacing story, that had me gripped all the way through. It's every bit as good as C J Tudor's wonderful previous book the Chalk man and similar in style and type of setting, though both are very different, stand-alone novels. This is a superb horror story well worthy of comparisons to Stephen King.
Our protagonist is Joe Thorne, he's a teacher who returns to his childhood hometown, an old pit village called Arnhill, near Nottingham, to take up a position teaching at the local school he was once a pupil at. Joe is quite a complex character, though one I really liked. He obviously has a bit of a past, both back when he was a boy and in the intervening 25 years since he left school as he seems to know a few really dodgy characters and it isn't long until he starts bumping into folk from his childhood, this is a small town with that claustrophobic feel, where everyone knows everyone else and you just can't avoid anyone for long.
He doesn't want to avoid people though, he's come back to confront a terrible event which happened when he was 15 and discover once and for all what happened to his little sister Annie, whom he adored. At only 8 years old she went missing. He has had a cryptic anonymous message saying only, it's happening again and he is reluctantly drawn back to this gloomy place, shadowed by the traces of the old mine which created the town in it's heyday, then virtually destroyed it following it's closure. Now turned into a piece of parkland the Pit looms around every corner and it's influence remains in the very air of Arnhill.
Like the authors first book, it is told in dual time as Joe narrates it now and then takes us back to when he was a lad, when the story of what happened to little Annie is the stuff nightmares are made of.
This is one heck of a scary book, creepingly fearful it oozes with a malignant miasma that taints everything it touches. Even the house Joe rents has its secrets. There is a taint of a murder which was committed there, we are treated to chittering, skittering creepy crawlies, and the overwhelming sense that something, or someone is out to get Joe.
Several storylines intertwine and we are never quite sure who, of the many brilliant characters can be trusted and who is to be viewed as an enemy. If you like something to send shivers down your spine this is the perfect book to curl up with by a cozy fire this winter, but maybe not when you're completely alone in the house.
The Blurb.
One night, Annie went missing. Disappeared from her own bed. There were searches, appeals. Everyone thought the worst. And then, miraculously, after forty-eight hours, she came back. But she couldn't, or wouldn't, say what had happened to her.
Something happened to my sister. I can't explain what. I just know that when she came back, she wasn't the same. She wasn't my Annie.
I didn't want to admit, even to myself, that sometimes I was scared to death of my own little sister.
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