Review: Not his finest...
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 7, 2013
Though I did not love Cottam's debut novel, I recently readDark Echoand was really surprised by how much I enjoyed it. So, I decided to give his most recent e-book release a shot. I was pretty surprised to see that this book only came out digitally, considering Cottam's sort of old-fashioned style and often historical supernatural thriller-genre. And the premise certainly intrigued me, so with some excitement, I eagerly downloaded the title.Right away, the amount of formatting errors and just "rough" quality detracted from the story. The abrupt transitions between character's P.O.V.s were not clearly delineated and it really slowed down the pacing even further until it became clear that the paragraph marked not only a shift in perspective, but an entirely new scene. The poor physicalities of the digital book aside, the premise was certainly interesting - a sort of History Channel-esque Ancient Aliens and more set up to discover the mystery behind a lost colony in the remote Scottish Isles. The emphasis on the printed newspaper have an added twist which was nice to see. Other writers would have framed this around a reality TV show or something more modern. This really added to the creepiness.Unfortunately, Cottam's overly methodical building of the fairly large cast of characters bogged the pacing down. The more frightening scenes were few and far between and then constantly referenced and reiterated, fulling eliminating the scary atmosphere. The at-the-last-hour climax really did not compensate for the dullness of the preceding chapters, and the big reveal fell flat for me. It was really a shame, because while a lot of the characters felt pretty real and sympathetic, combined with the overall interesting premise, this could have been a really excellent and spooky story. The finale felt rushed in comparison to its slow build up... All in all, I found this to be pretty disappointing.