Review: An excellent read and really good value.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 31, 2013
This review is based on an advance review copy, supplied by the publisher.Forget Vampires, Werewolves, Ghosts and other monsters. When it comes down to being scared, all we really need is other humans. Nothing is scarier to us than trying to hold our lives and families together in the face of interference from other people, whose motives we can't even understand.Robert Mitchell and his family have returned from a camping holiday, and they are on their way to a Northern village, to take possession of the house that he'd bought not long before. They need to escape the terrors of the city, where his wife had been brutally raped, and try to piece their lives back together.They arrive, only to discover their new house occupied by another family, and from there things start to get very, very unpleasant. Who are the Corbeaus, and why are they trying to destroy Robert and his family?Sometimes, stories and characters steadfastly decline to follow the paths their author intended, so despite my opening paragraph, events do eventually take a walk on the weird side. Some may be disappointed by this, and wish the author had kept his evil firmly rooted in the petty nastiness of humankind. Gary McMahon handles the slide into the Twilight Zone so adeptly though, that I didn't feel it detracted at all from the paranoia and unease of the powerful first half.I can't deny, however, that I would be intrigued to see how the story would have panned out, had he not allowed his muse to change tack. In any case, it's an excellent read and really good value for the low price.