Sublimely drawn characters fuel a slasher romp that delivers the goods.
In this second installment of a horror series, a Los Angeles family’s holiday getaway turns into a violent melee with a crazed killer.
The Werner siblings aren’t terribly excited about this year’s Christmas at a rental cottage in the secluded woods. Teenager Austin and his tween sister, Fiona, know they’ll be stuck in a tiny home with their always-bickering parents, who are on the verge of divorce. But the kids harbor resentments as well. Austin can’t help but feel their parents shower his sister with all their attention while Fiona, who has juvenile idiopathic arthritis and walks with a cane, believes it’s her fault that the family is in disarray. But there may be more things to worry about, especially after they hear that a fire 10 years ago at the “old Thornton house”—the place they’re renting—killed a family of four (“Just a tragic accident caused by faulty tree lights”). Yet some claim that teenager Candy Cain slaughtered them first. Surely that’s only an urban legend, but then who’s that humming songs and creeping around the cottage? Slasher fans certainly won’t be disappointed with McAuley’s short horror novel. Staples of the genre (particularly the films) are in full force, from gory deaths accommodating the holiday theme to a stalking, seemingly unstoppable killer who, in this case, sings off-key Christmas carols. Readers will sympathize and root for the Werners, as the story provides insight into each family member, like Austin, a closeted gay teen who’s crushing on his best friend. The cast further includes people with a variety of reasons to stop by the rental home, providing the killer with a string of potential victims. While the author satisfies the genre by showcasing the brutal murders, there’s ample suspense, as a genuinely scary killer roams the property during a snowstorm that makes escape an unlikely option. The frenzied final act, although sometimes predictable, offers a few surprises as well.
Sublimely drawn characters fuel a slasher romp that delivers the goods.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 173
Publisher: Shortwave Media
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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