Genre: Horror
Publisher: Samhain Publishing
Publication Date: 5th May 2015
Pages: 100
MY REVIEW:
I received an advance copy of Scarecrows by Christine
Hayton from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This is said review. This
book is published by Samhain Publishing.
Never read Christine Hayton before. Saw this on NetGalley
and liked the description so picked it up. So many good points and so many bad
but a really good read into the bargain.
In 1964, Robert gets wakened by his wife Clare. She can’t
find their daughter Cathy. Robert goes searching and finds her asleep in a corn
field close by. She is covered in blood, not her own, and she is holding his
axe. Close by is the very dead body of her classmate Emily.
Cathy gets put into an asylum for kids while doctors try
and fathom why she did what she did. She tells everyone it was the scarecrows
that murdered Emily. No one believes her. They should have.
This is one that is in that grey area between a short
story and a novella. Not quite short enough for a short but not quite long
enough for a novella. It’s what I like to call a “shovella”. At about one
hundred pages you can read this in a short few hours.
This is classic horror. It has murder caused by an unseen
force with no witnesses apart from a five year old girl who is presumed to be
the killer. She tries to tell everyone she watched the scarecrows from her
window at night walking around the corn field. No one believes her but
everything points to the fact she is telling the truth. It has a “retarded”
(the stories description not mine) boy that makes the scarecrows but no one
suspects he is involved. A family surrounded by tragedy. A country setting
where bad things have been happening for years. A deep pond where it is
rumoured the mob dumped bodies for years.
This has a real old feel about it. It felt more like the
70’s than the 60’s to me. Felt very like The Omen in its atmosphere. It is
scary. It is creepy. It is old school horror.
The book jumps about a bit from the past to the present
telling the story from different angles. This helps you get a better picture of
the driving forces behind the murder, the families, and the problems the
doctors have to deal with in helping young Cathy. You can feel the absolute
despair of her father, the hatred in the community and the torture of everyone
involved.
Those are the good bits.
The negatives? At times the writing in this is absolutely
awful. The narrative is so stop and go that the story almost falls on its face.
If this was a film you could imagine the actors being cardboard cut-outs
instead of humans. It reads as something that, if edited at all, must have been
done by someone either very drunk or half awake. I normally try not to be cruel
about books but this was just awful at times.
This really disappoints me. Why? Because the story was so
bloody damn good. The way it was structured was brilliant. Like I said before
it was so much like the old school horror I grew up with and loved so much. If
it had just been written / edited better. Close but no cigar.
To summarise: classic horror style. Very creepy and will
send the shivers up your spine. Really disappointing writing at times. If you
get this (and I urge you too because in a weird way you will enjoy it) stick
with it. Don’t let the writing style put you off. You will definitely enjoy it.
I just hope you don’t get as frustrated as me. With a little bit more effort in
this I would be rocketing this book into my top ten for the year. Alas though,
it won’t get near it.
General rating:
★★★.5 Good but could have been so much better.
Horror rating:
★★★★ Very creepy.
You can buy Scarecrows here:
Book Synopsis:
They do more than frighten birds. Much more.
Early one morning in the fall of 1964, Robert searched
for his missing six-year-old daughter, Cathy. He found her asleep in a nearby
cornfield, covered in blood and holding a small axe. A few feet away lay the
mutilated body of her classmate Emily.
Assumed guilty of murder, Cathy lived in a hospital for
insane children. She always gave the same account of what happened. She talked
of murderous scarecrows that roamed the cornfield on moonlit nights. Her
doctors considered her delusional. The police, her neighbors and the press
thought she was dangerous. And so she remained incarcerated. No one believed
her. That was a mistake.
Christine lives in Windsor, Ontario with her family. She
is an avid reader, but her true love is writing. She enjoys reading literary,
classics, horror, and contemporary fiction. Her retirement from the world of
accounting and business management, turned into a full-time writing career in
2012.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd. is releasing “Scarecrows”, her
first horror story, May 5, 2015. Currently she is editing her first
contemporary fiction novel. The first draft of the second novel is complete,
and the outline for a third is in construction. These will complete the 3-book
series, and she is hoping a Canadian publisher will scoop them up.
Christine likes to juggle several ongoing projects at
once. She is currently writing books, novellas, and short stories. She blogs
and posts various short stories on her Wordpress Site.
You can see more of Christine at her website.
No comments:
Post a Comment