Synopsis
Mona Awad’s Bunny meets Stranger Things when a summer storm sweeps through a sleepy town, unleashing a monstrous power that threatens to bend reality, from the Bram Stoker award winning author of Queen of Teeth.
Three years after running away from home, Olivia is stuck with a dead-end job in nowhere town Chapel Hill, Pennsylvania. At least she has her best friend, Sunflower.
Olivia figures she’ll die in Chapel Hill, if not from boredom, then the summer night storm which crashes into town with a mind-bending monster in tow.
If Olivia’s going to escape Chapel Hill and someday reconcile with her parents, she’ll need to dodge residents enslaved by the storm’s otherworldly powers and find Sunflower.
But as the night strains friendships and reality itself, Olivia suspects the storm, and its monster, may have its eyes on Sunflower and everything she loves.
Including Olivia.
Review
I don’t think that there are enough superlatives to describe Hailey Piper’s works. I think I have seen them all; mesmerising, original, astounding to name but a few! And I have to say that they all fit.
I was first introduced to Hailey Piper when I read The Worm and His Kings. Since then, I have acquired and read more books by her, resulting in her becoming one of those ‘must read authors’.
A Light Most Hateful takes place in the town (I think it’s a town) of Chapel Hill and follows Olivia as she is plunged into the worst night of her life.
Whilst she is working on the concessions stand of the Drive-in movie theatre, she is waiting for her best friend (and secret crush) Sunflower. Not long after she turns up things start to get a bit weird. She meets someone called Christmas who tells her that they want to eat her heart, followed by a strange storm, and then saves a vagrant called Lizzie from the small town minds of local youths who think it is good fun to throw cans at the poor woman. However, they get more than they bargained for when Lizzie turns into a monster and then eats their friend.
After the initial panic, Olivia finds herself in a world in which everything has turned into a nightmare The inhabitants of Chapel Hill have turned into mindless automatons, who when touched turn into mindless killing machines. There’s a monster that is chasing her, and she has to save her best friend, Sunflower.
The story takes the reader into familiar themes of a town that has seemingly being taken over by an outside force and pits the lead character into a fight for survival, whilst avoiding the things that are trying to kill them. However, the book then metamorphoses into something that is totally unexpected and out of this world.
One of Hailey Piper’s skills is that she will introduce the twist in the story at unexpected points and thus catapults things off into a different trajectory to the one that was originally started, ultimately shedding its skin to be something else entirely.
Likened at times to Stranger Things, this book reminded me of so much more. There are times when the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers came to mind, or The Colour Out of Space. And at other times it strongly brought essences of The Twilight Zone to mind, particularly It’s a Good Life based on the story by Jerome Bixby.
A Light Most Hateful is a nightmarish tale of love, loss and accepting who you are. It is terrifying and it is mesmerising, and as my friends over at Gingernuts of Horror quite rightly says, it puts Hailey Piper as the Queen of Cosmic Horror.
Mark aka Fantasy Book Nerd
I’m Mark, otherwise known as Fantasy Book Nerd (I don’t know if you have seen my blog, but it’s been going for a while), and this is me in my other iteration, the horror lover. This time without the normal skull mask on, well actually, I do still have the skull mask on, I mean, I can’t subject you all to my real face, there’s laws against that!
Horror was actually the first thing I got into as a kid. I got bought horror books for kids, I watched all the old Hammer Horror and Universal movies before moving onto video nasties when the video player was released, and also read a load of horror, including all the old stalwarts like James Herbert, Stephen King and others.
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