Digital Reads Reviews

This was a short novella at 84 odd pages which showed me how a man would endeavor to save his family at any cost.

After a hardworking day in his farm, Callum went home exhausted. Dinner and bed soon followed along with minor skirmishes as things routinely moved in his family. But something woke him up in the middle of the night.

His investigation of his home and barn led him to the chicken coop where blood and carcasses were strewn on the floor. He barely took a breath when suddenly something moved…

My second book by Karl Drinkwater showed me a different facet of this author’s literary capacity. Horror is difficult to write, though things that go bump in the night might scare us, in a prose, they rarely do. The atmosphere is almost always missing, especially in a novella.

And that’s what I liked about this book. There was an impending sense of doom and danger that followed me as I read through the chapters. The beings, though strange, didn’t really cause my heart to thump, but it was the writing which caused me to race through the pages, trying to outrun them.

To see the family struggling to escape, using all means necessary to protect the kids showed me their valor and sacrifice. The parents’ love for the kids really shone through. Then came my niggles. The characters were not developed, the story didn’t really follow through. It was just a slice of the night.

The atmosphere was dark and moribund where the danger was acute and imminent, it was the desperate need to escape that clawed through the book. Such was the aura of the story which left me feeling as if it was I who had run away from the creatures, craving to live to write this review.

I received a free digital copy of the book from the author, and this is my journey into its pages, straight from the heart!! STRICTLY HONEST AND UNBIASED.

All my reviews can be read here

How far would you go to save your family?

First the birds went quiet.

Then the evening sky filled with strange clouds that trapped the heat below.

Now Callum wakes, dripping in sweat. Something has come to his isolated Welsh farm. If he’s going to keep his family alive during this single night when all hell breaks loose, he’ll have to think fast. And when he sees what he’s facing, he suspects even that may not be enough.

Publication Date: 23rd May 2016