“The biggest news in the small northern town of Jackson was the reopening of the local hydro-power plant. Until the deaths. First a farmer was found horribly mutilated in his field. Then a little girl disappeared from her home.
Deep in the woods a deputy came upon a chamber of horrors straight from a nightmare. And through it all, one child is haunted by visions of the mysterious “blue man,” a madman who brings with him blood and pain and terror, a terror spawned by forces no one can understand.”
Nate Kenyon’s debut novel is the Bram Stoker Award Finalist Bloodstone and his second novel, also a Stoker Finalist is the The Reach.
Bloodstone is more of a traditional Gothic horror novel, The Reach dabbles in man’s incessant need to use science for his own twisted means. I really enjoyed both books. I did a review on The Reach which you can read here.
His third book “The Bone Factory” is due for release in July 2009 from our good friends at Dorchester Publishing.
First off let me state that being from the frozen north myself, I have a soft spot for horror stories with snow, woods and cold as the backdrop.
Nate Kenyon does not disappoint. He is able to paint a vivid life-like picture of this inhospitable land. It is a story of what one man will have to overcome to save his family and his life. He is up against one for the most formidable foes known to man…nature in all its cold frozen glory and a mysterious madman that will stop at nothing to kill those who he perceives are his enemies.
David Pierce it as his wits end trying to find a job after getting fired from his previous one by dubious means. He wants his wife Helen to stay at home to take care of their daughter Jessica. Jessica is prone to night terrors and often wakes up in the middle of the night screaming.
He accepts a job to help get a hydo-power plant on-line in the deep woods of Canada. He moves his family there in the middle of winter at the companies behest with no experience of living so far removed from civilization.
Things then start to happen that will throw David and his family into a terror filled, blood soaked nightmare.
Kenyon’s writing is vastly improving and his character development is getting downright scary.
But the main character in the book for me is the desolate snow covered primeval forest that surrounds the Pierce’s new found life in Canada and Kenyon nails it.
For those of you that have never experienced first hand what it is like in the deep woods in the middle of winter you need to read this book. It will send chills up and down your spine, your heart will race and your breath will come in short frozen gasps.
When David first goes out to the back of his house to appease his daughter’s plea that someone is watching her from the woods he experiences first hand what it is like to come up against the frozen north.
This scene is one of the scariest, heart pounding scenes I’ve read this year. I know what its like to be out in the woods in the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter. The silence is unnerving, the different sounds from the creaking trees to the falling clumps of snow from the pine branches all contribute to one frightening experience and Kenyon describes it beautifully. I had to put the book down halfway through this scene, it was so intense.
If there was one small complaint I had it would be that I wished he would have gone into more detail about the background of the main antagonist. He delved into it somewhat, I would have liked more fully fleshed out.
This in no way takes away from the power of Kenyon’s descriptive prose and story.
If you want to know how it feels to be cut off from civilization, trapped in an unforgiving brutal environment where just one wrong step leads to a slow frozen or a brutal, bloody pain filled death this book is for you and I highly recommend it.
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