Contents

That Ghoul Ava by TW Brown
Kin by Kealan Patrick Burke
The Colony: Genesis by Michaelbrent Collings
Chronicler of the Undead by Mainak Dhar
Painted Darkness by Brian James Freeman
Chasing Spirits by Glynn James
The Home by Scott Nicholson
Preta’s Realm: The Haunting (The Hidden Evil Trilogy, #1) by J. Thorn

The blurb will tell you that this is in the vein of the ‘Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ and ‘Deliverance’ and, while I can see what they mean, it doesn’t do the book justice. This is not a ‘slasher’ book or a book that reads like a movie. This is far more. This is a novel that begins where the other stories ended and explores the impact such horror has on the survivors, their family and, though we may not like them, the perpetrators of the horror.

A new novel by the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of THE TURTLE BOY.

On a scorching hot summer day in Elkwood, Alabama, Claire Lambert staggers naked, wounded, and half-blind away from the scene of an atrocity.

Fire licked with cold tongues at her groin; the blood in her hair hardened, and whatever vile substance now lay in a gelid, solidifying lump in the hole which had once contained her right eye, ticked as if someone had replaced it with a watch to measure the time she had left. But still she looked, still she stared, as the merciless sun turned her scalp pink and cooked the flesh on her back. Sweat, cooler in the scant shade beneath her breasts, fell like tears. At length, she twitched, and her legs shuffled her toward the barbed wire fence that separated the field from the road. 

She is the sole survivor of a nightmare that claimed her friends, and even as she prays for rescue, the killers — a family of cannibalistic lunatics — are closing in. Luke is one of the five brothers who have raped her and cut her toes and stabbed her. They work in the woods, near a junkyard “where they flattened and crumpled up the cars they decided they had no use for, after flattening and crumpling up their owners”.

A soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder returns from Iraq to the news that his brother is among the murdered in Elkwood.

In snowbound Detroit, a waitress trapped in an abusive relationship gets an unexpected visit that will lead to bloodshed and send her back on the road to a past she has spent years trying to outrun.

And Claire, the only survivor of the Elkwood Massacre, haunted by her dead friends, dreams of vengeance… a dream which will be realized as grief and rage turn good people into cold-blooded murderers and force alliances among strangers.

It’s time to return to Elkwood.

In the spirit of such iconic horror classics as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Deliverance, Kin begins at the end and studies the possible aftermath for the survivors of such traumas upon their return to the real world — the guilt, the grief, the thirst for revenge — and sets them on an unthinkable journey… back into the heart of darkness.

This book was insanely good. Not all the heroes survive. Not all the bad people die. There’s brutal murder and rape and child abuse mention. This is a walking, talking trigger warning book and it’s the best one that kept me glued on for the whole nine yards. The “final girl” is a fighter. She’s not a romantic role model. She’s missing fingers and toes and her innocence has been lost forever.

Nobody is sane (except maybe Kara, her sister). The sheriff is in cahoots with the cannibals (minor spoiler) and the doctor is innocent of everything he’s been framed of. My only question – when they found so many dead bodies, why didn’t the FBI get involved? Why were they happy to accept the nice and easy solution that the man who had the body parts also did the killing, ignoring the only surviving witness testimony?

PS: I nearly puked when Luke came out of his mother’s body like an ill planned rebirth.