awesome witch story! kept me totally engrosed. ( )

This was a fast paced novel that I enjoyed! It's a story about a horror writer, (oh no, not another one you may be thinking), but this one is slightly different. A story comes to the protagonist, Thad, almost completely whole; streaming through him like lightning, it comes out on paper. This story is more than just a fictional, historical account of the witch trials in Salem, MA. It may not be fictional, for one thing, and it may not take place entirely in the past.

I liked how this tale was related, with chapters featuring the present alternating between chapters from The Journal of Clayton Stone. It took a little while to get into the flow of things, but not too long. That's because the pacing in this book was very fast and the chapters were short. Before I knew it I was speeding along and then I just had to finish it, (right? You know how it is.), because I was so close to the end.

All of the characters here were flawed, but for me that made them more real. There were a good bunch of creepy times going on in the house where Thad's daughter and his pregnant wife waited for him to return from the sale of his book. As this story went along those creepy times graduated up to scary as hell. Thad wasn't having the best time with his book agent either.

This is a story of witchcraft, the first in a series. I have sworn to myself that I wouldn't start another series until it was finished, but here I am. A friend of mine on Goodreads mentioned that he liked this book, I took a look, claimed it for review at HAD and here we are. I'm glad that I did choose it, because I found it to be well written, fast paced, scary and imaginative. I will be looking forward to the next in the series because it's been a long time since I read such a damn fine witch story. (As an added bonus, this novel is sandwiched between two nods to Needful Things. There may have been other nods to SK as well...Grady's? But that might be just my active imagination.)

Highly recommended!

A free copy of this book was provided in exchange for an honest review. This is it!

This and other reviews like it can be found at www.HorrorAfterDark.com.
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I picked this up because of it's connection to Stephen King's "Needful Things", but I kept reading it because I liked it! It's a witch story, wherein an author is inspired to write a story, that just happens to have been true! And his story brings Her story to life, and puts him and his family in grave danger. And the bonus, for me, is that Leland Gaunt is the facilitator of this evil! A good October read! ( )

This book has received ALOT of terrific reviews, awards and five star ratings. It was a good read but I cannot give it five stars. When I read I am particularly put off by spelling and grammatical errors of which I have found countless in some novels; this book did not have anything glaringly in need of editing and that made it very easy to read it without stopping to decipher meanings that would be clear were the correct punctuation used. Bravo to the editor.

The novel is divided into two parts, one present day about the McAlister family and one set in the past written as the journal of a man attending a witch trial. This second part, was boring as all hell. I read the first few chapters devoted to this journal and then, after five or six, I started skipping them altogether, yes, it is important, no, you do not need to read it all to know what is happening. The novel would have been stronger without these "excerpts". The novel is broken into rather odd chapters but they are short and action packed and full of cliffhangers that drag you into the next chapter right away. You can make it through 13 chapters and only have read 30 pages however.

Overall, the story was good. It was scary and suspenseful and I was eager to read it once I had started it. Five stars? Not quite. I look forward to the next book in the series and hope that the entire novel is as entertaining as the present day chapters of this one. ( )

It's been a long time since I've read a witch-themed horror book - I recognize some of the ideas used in this one, with a few of them being new. There was something familiar about it, almost like the characters themselves were haunted by something they recognized in the back of their minds. The book goes back and forth through brief experts in the novel of something that happened back in the day with the original witch trials, to the current day where an innocent family now has to pay the price for their success.

The book reads quickly, the chapters driven by scenes told through the points of view of a small scattering of characters. Pace is consistent, where there isn't much down time to grow bored. The author has some genuinely creepy scenes, especially with the strange minions and the dirt that keeps trapping the family inside the house. I tried practicing a clickity-click-click noise with my own fingernails - how annoying that would grow.

While the story works for being an old-fashioned witch focused horror tale, with a small surprise or two, it didn't live up to my expectations with characterization. I found the page players one-dimensional and predictable, down to some of the dialogue, especially from Dell toward the end. Enough of the story is too familiar, with the characters being a little light, and some of the predictable cheesiness like seduction in the basket, that I settled on a three star rating.

It's worth a read, especially for horror fans who dig this kind of thing.
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