Synopsis
When you bury your past, make sure that it’s dead.
It’s the mid-nineties. Grunge and flannel are fading as the Spice Girls and Hot Topic conquer the malls. Cherry gloss glistens on the lips of the youth. Modems hiss as America comes online.
And in a fog-drenched cove at the edge of New England, something terrible awakens when a fisherman reels in a gruesome catch: the remains of a young woman.
Remains still pulsing with furious life.
For Megan Monroe and her friends, this is how their nightmare begins: a wet whisper over their shoulder, a dark hand reaching out from the edge of their sight, and a name clawing at the back of their minds.
A young woman scratched from their memory.
To stop this devouring terror, Megan will need to mend broken friendships and reassemble her fractured past, for what stalks them hungers to remake itself in their image… piece by bloody piece.
Dig into the haunted past with Head Like a Hole, a novel of malignant secrets, shattered friendships, and twisted bodily horror.
★★★★★ “This is a brilliant read. A wonderful well-written plot and a story line that had me engaged from the start.”
Review
Gave this a go on audible, and the narration by Tom Jordan was pretty solid.
I could tell within the first few chapters of this one that the writing felt a notch up. It read professional, with a clear voice, and wicked fast direction. The POVs and twirling timeframes keep you on the edge of your seat, and I was hooked to it in a way that I haven’t felt lately. While I’ve finished some other reads in between/since, I think this one started pulling me up out of the kind of slump I was forming. The Goosebumps-esque (but adult) cliffhanger chapter endings certainly helped.
A successful podcaster is looking into a mysterious past with sparse notes found in his uncle’s journal. Strangely, the story unravels itself, and other than him being a clever character and the vessel for some of the backstory, he wasn’t really a necessary character. But on the few occasions the story slows down, he gets the ball moving again, so it works out fine.
A story of mistrust, mistreatment, jealousy, and deceit, Head Like a Hole, is a powerhouse of revenge and regret. Not without its supernatural elements, the novel morphs more than once on what the reader can expect. Kind of like mixing the murder mystery side of a slasher with something tainted like the Ring or the Grudge. And the author does body horror pretty well. I was glad to find that the cover wasn’t just art to draw in the reader, and that wasn’t even the worst of it.
The novel has more than its far share of characters, but there are a few that have pretty flat desires/actions. The author does a pretty solid job of reigning it in to close it all up though.
And I will definitely check out more by the author.
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