This commendable horror tale boasts a menacing tone and interminable tension.
Islanders fight off savage otherworldly creatures in Kelly’s grim thriller.
Hurricane Nora comes on with little warning, taking an increasingly catastrophic course around the globe and shocking meteorologists and citizens alike with its sudden and unpredictable diversions. As it heads toward Norway, the people of Crover Island, off the northern coast of Scotland, brace themselves. In the meantime, local fishermen dream up a way to boost Crover’s financial situation through tourism: They’ll simply claim that Scotland’s legendary Loch Ness monster is often spotted near Crover Island’s many sea caves, where they’ll provide boat tours. No one yet knows that, in the midst of Nora’s rampage, a fault line running under the island has shifted, and horrifying “things” that have long dwelled in darkness now swim to the surface. As the newly purchased tour boat welcomes its first batch of passengers, the worsening storm proves too much and forces the boat ashore. Nearby caves offer no refuge; bizarre, clawed creatures with gills, pointy teeth, and an insatiable hunger emerge and viciously attack. Around the same time on the island, the Rev. Henry Knoxmakes a gruesome discovery of the mangled bodies of backpacking Americans. Islanders Robert Campbell and Bryan Brown, along with Bryan’s daughter, Marie, and visiting marine science grad student Tim Kempson, get wind of the bloody campsite and quickly realize the horror that’s unfolding. They split up to warn the people of Crover’s villages, and it’s not long before everyone’s plunged into a fight for survival, including the tour-boat guides trying to keep their passengers safe.
Kelly’s novel, like all good horror stories, firmly establishes its setting. Crover Island is small and isolated, but, as Marie points out, the island has “plenty of open space to explore in peace. Or get lost in.” Its citizens revel in their quiet lives but recognize the benefits of tourism while showing kindness and respect to island visitors, making their plight all the more urgent to readers as the narrative gradually becomes a series of confrontations between humans and the beings from “that lower realm.” The author provides relatively scant information about the creatures, maintaining a general sense of mystery surrounding their origin that makes the unknown beasts even scarier. Specifics are also sparse when it comes to the monsters (“things that seemed half fish and half human”; “monstrous creatures”), but the story highlights the most crucial aspects: These aquatic beings breathe on land and have lots of sharp bits to take down prey in an alarmingly rapid fashion. Where Kelly’s novel unquestionably triumphs is its dense, suspenseful atmosphere. Each of the human senses act as reminders of the creatures’ unwavering presence— sounds like slapping webbed feet and piercing screeches mean they’re on the hunt; a rancid stench means they’re fast approaching. In addition to everything else, an unrelenting storm and a thick, ominous fog feel impossible to escape. The story’s frenzied final act leads to an ending most readers won’t see coming.
This commendable horror tale boasts a menacing tone and interminable tension.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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