APARTMENT 16 By Adam Nevill – Reviewed

Apryl’s great aunt is dead. Died in a taxi not far from her home, an apartment near Knightbridge in Barrington House. Apryl’s mother had left her to sort out the flat and sell it, but Apryl wants to know more about the long lost aunt they haven’t heard from for so many years, and when she finds her aunt’s journals she encounters a world of treachery, secrets, murder and madness.

Seth works as the Night Porter as Barrington House. He’s an artist just doing his job to pay the rent. But there are strange noises coming from Apartment 16. Although he’s not allowed to enter the flat he knows he must, he is drawn to it, and he knows someone or something is inside. When Seth opens the door his life and his sanity will be torn to shreds…

Ooh, I like a book that starts with a Prologue that sends shivers down your spine. Horror novels aren’t always scary, some are gross-out gory, some are thrillers with an extra level of violence, very rarely does a book actually make you not want to go to sleep, to make you turn on all the lights at night, to make you not want to enter the darkness. But Apartment 16 is one of those books. It’s a basic haunted house story so well told, so chilling, so shocking, so menacing, you can’t help but be swept away by it.

It reminded me of Joe Hill’s The Heart-Shaped Box with its clean, concise prose and utterly terrifying strange presences. It’s a new ghost story, despite the familiar theme, we have much more than a simple ghost story here. The plot is well thought out, gradually drawing us deeper into the characters’ experiences; the murder mystery element keeps things moving along nicely, as does one of the characters the slow descent into madness.

There is also a touch of Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, in the back-story.

There are so many good ideas in here that as a fellow writer it’s quite annoying. Every fifty pages I was thinking that would make a good story, this would make a good story, and Nevill has included them all in the one novel.

Shatteringly good, this one is creepy novel. A masterfully chilling debut.

CIMARRON ROSE By James Lee Burke – Reviewed

Lucas Smothers is arrested for murder, except he was unconscious at the time. He’s put in prison between two hardened criminals, both murderers, one of whom brags about how he killed an old woman, the other escapes killing a guard in the process.

Billy Bob Holland is a pain in the ass according to most of the people who know him, that’s what makes him a great lawyer, and when Vernon, Lucas’ father, asks him for help, Billy Bob can’t refuse. You see, Lucas is in all likelihood his own son.

Add into this a whole lot of Texas mess, a massive back-story, DEA, outback mob, rich kids gone bad, and shake in some other family dramas and you have a Southern American crime novel the likes of which you’ll be familiar with if you’d read any of Burke’s novels before. Burke has a unique voice that’s compelling, his stories are riveting and his characters have such a back-story it’s hard to believe he just thought them up.

American crime thrillers don’t get much better than this.

VAMPYRRHIC By Simon Clark – Reviewed

I quite enjoyed this. It’s not normally my kind of thing, it’s a gentle, old-skool horror novel.

The premise is excellent, Thor (from Norse mythology) made a pact with a family a thousand years ago and gave them a vampire army to destroy all of Christendom. Unfortunately the family didn’t stick to the plan, and now, a thousand years later, David Leppington has returned to the family home to find that he is the last of the line, and expected to take control of the vampire army on its unending march to domination of the Christian world.

That would have been a great book. Unfortunately what we get is this great idea as the back-story. The main plot concerns David Leppington returning to his hometown, the town of Leppington, named after his family, and discovering the legend of Thor’s vampire army from his uncle, and then attempting to destroy the army before they begin their attack.

The first two thirds of the book set up the story as we are gradually given more information about the legend and the town. The story slowly and gently unravels, the vampires begin to escape and attack the human population of Leppington, but it isn’t until the uncle blows a hole in the bars imprisoning the creatures that the action kicks up a notch and David and his new-found friends, must fight for their lives.

Clark is a writer of such potential, as shown by the premise. But here he’s missed a massive opportunity. The book we’re given is in no way as exciting, entertaining or as passionate as it could have been. It seems this is a much more traditional, staid, and middle-of-the-road novel, playing safe rather than provoking any kind of emotion.

The writing isn’t Clark at his best either, his characters are all weak, limp-wristed, wet-wipes. Nothing there to incite any feeling.

Still, being the wrong book, a massive missed opportunity, a complete failure in potential, this still isn’t such a bad book. It certainly doesn’t have much going for it; but it’s a good little standard horror novel, similar to what Richard Laymon used to churn out endlessly.

Typical low-impact horror.