The Blackwood Hills Horror

 Very engaging tale that the reader slips into right away. Mary is an awkward teenager, a loner with no friends. Her father does not believe she needs any, just her church and her bible. Until the night a small group of schoolmates come by and convince her to come with them on an adventure.

One not all of them are going to survive.

I enjoyed this book. There are quite a few reviews I have read on other books that state "could not put it down". Well, I'm going to say that here. The Blackwood Hills Horror was very difficult to put down. I carried it with me in case I had a few spare moments to snatch a chapter or two and before I knew it , I was done.

Great little horror read.

I received a free ARC of this book and am voluntarily leaving my honest review of the tale.

A retro vibe, creepy, run down American town, with the obligatory abandoned lunatic asylum. A terrible tragedy closed it down 60 years before.

In come the vile group of annoying hormonal teenagers sweeping poor, vulnerable Mary forward. Forcing her to visit the terrifying asylum. Aaaarrrghhhh!

Cue - scares, death, gore, being trapped, copious amounts of ghosts/ghouls, gruesome experimental surgery and underlying haunting pasts being unravelled.

The Blackwood Hills is an idyllic place to live, where everyone knows your family and looks out for you.

Best place to raise your family back in 1963.

The only blip on the horizon is The Blackwood Hills Asylum run by Professor Freeman. He runs the asylum as he sees fit. Using extreme measures to control his patients.

When a woman comes into his care with no known name he decides to call her Audrey. After being there a couple of months it becomes obvious that she is pregnant but with no idea who she is and the father to her unborn child and with Audrey becoming more and more violent she is caged.

One of the guards looking after the patients, Grady Hawk doesn't have any empathy towards the patients, especially Audrey who will shout and scream two words over and over again 'Blood Wolf!'

On his night shift Audrey was being louder than normal and was disturbing the other caged patients until he realised that her waters had broken. Nurses were called in to help restrain her and give birth to a healthy baby boy, but in the aftermath she kills another fellow guard and all hell breaks loose.

Present day and Blackwood Hills is more like a forgotten town. Nobody wants to live there after what happened in the asylum but some people still remain.

Reverend Kane had taken over the church from his father and with his small congregation including Saul Strohkirch and his seventeen year old daughter Mary, he tries to keep the evil at bay. But when he tells Saul something about his past things change forever.

Mary was never popular at school and when her one 'friend ' begs her to go out with her and her friends Cameron, Todd and Kirsty she refuses but with Carrie's relentless persuasion she gives in.

Little did she know that they planned to stay the night at the abandoned Blackwood asylum.

Something has awakened the evil that has been locked away for so long within the walls of the asylum. Who has the power to unleash the devil and who will succumb to the depths of hell?

This novel has a certain quality to it that makes it hard to put it down. At times it had me second guessing where the story was going to go because the lines were blurred between who was actually good or bad.

After thinking on it a bit I came to the conclusion that the whole novel was meant to be something that would be chilling, viscerally moving, and speak to all the horrors the mind is capable of conjuring in the dark.

It may not be my specific cup of tea but I'm sure other readers, especially those that love this kind of horror, will enjoy this one immensely.