Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)It doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist to notice that the field of horror is male dominated, probably more so than mysteries or science fiction. The biggest female name in the genre is Anne Rice, and even she is not so much a horror writer as an author who uses the trappings of horror (vampires, witches, etc.) to tell dark fantasy stories. It isn't really fair, because a woman can write just as well (or just as poorly) as a man. Sarah Pinborough is hardly a household name, but her book Tower Hill is an example of a horror novel comparable to many other mid-tier writers of the genre, regardless of gender.
In a way, Tower Hill is a buddy novel. Unfortunately, in this case, the buddies are a pair of murderous thugs who have a plan to take over the small Maine college town called Tower Hill. One becomes the new town priest (after disposing of the real one), while the other becomes a professor who also leads a club delving into the paranormal. Between the church and the club, most will be drawn in, where they will be slowly transformed into a sort of pod people.
Liz and Steve are a couple apartment-mates who are also part of the freshman class at the university. Liz has grown up in a repressed highly-devout environment which gives her a skepticism about the new priest. Steve is a kid from Detroit whose poverty will put work ahead of any gatherings. Together, they are a couple of the few who realize that something sinister is going on, but even they don't realize that these evil doings have a supernatural quality; the priest and professor are using Tower Hill to transform themselves into something more than human.
Pinborough's writing style makes this a fast-moving story which is good for around 85% of the book. The ending - as in many horror novels by many authors - is rather flaky, though there a couple nice twists too. Overall, this is worth reading. If you read a lot of horror, you won't find anything exceptionally different about Tower Hill, but you also won't find anything all that bad either.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Tower Hill
No comments:
Post a Comment