I am not huge on horror stories but this one was well written and gave me chills throughout.

Justin Wainwright has a podcast called WrightWire. He proceeds to reach out to well-known horror authors to provide them an opportunity to do an interview in the famous haunted Finch House on Halloween night and stay overnight in the home. Of course the authors are interested but trouble deciding if they actually want to be in the house. Eventually they decide to go and once settled in strange things begin to happen. EEK!

What will happen to the authors? What makes the house haunted?

Kill Creek by Scott Thomas.
At the end of a dark prairie road, nearly forgotten in the Kansas countryside, is the Finch House. For years it has remained empty, overgrown, abandoned. Soon the door will be opened for the first time in decades. But something is waiting, lurking in the shadows, anxious to meet its new guests…
Really good read. Creepy. Loved it. 5*.

This is one of those hard to review books because a lot of different things goes on in and it some of it good and some of it boring and then the end was like an adrenaline rush and it made me wonder what happened to the rest of the book and why couldn't it have been as cool!

In the prologue we learn about the  Finch sisters and how they were the last ones to live in the house and Rachel allowed only one man to come and get the story about what was going on. He was a parapsychologist and wanted to write a story about the history of the place and the strange things that go on in the house. 

Then in present day we have a man Wainwright who wants to bring together 4 horror authors who write very different types of horror. Sebastian is a legend in the genre and the oldest one there and he likes that fear factor not the gore. Sam, is sort of more the modern day horror legend but he is having a hard time writing his next book. T.C. who is the only female and she writes kind of a erotica type horror and then Daniel who is a Christian horror for Young Adult writer.  Wainwright wants to go viral with this awesome interview and he thinks it will be best done together and at the Kill Creek house. 

Strange things do happen when they are in the house but most of the weird stuff happens after they go home. Then gets pretty intense after they figure out what they have to do and go back to the house. 

I will say this book was pretty atmospheric and had some creepy spots but for probably 60% if not more of the book I was a tad bit bored. It only started getting more interesting for me when they had to go back to the house but then by that time I kind of had things figured out on what was going to happen so it wasn't very surprising. 

I don't think I ever got attached to any of the characters and so they could have all died and I wouldn't have minded but I really couldn't stand the female, T.C. was just so rude and I didn't like how she attacked Daniel and his religious beliefs and I really wanted her to die before the book even got started...lol. I felt this book was a little to long and could have been shorten and still be good and maybe I wasn't in the mindset to read a 419 page book at the time either.

I do think that others will enjoy this especially if you are more for character driven novels and like a lot of descriptive paragraphs that seem to go on and on about the people in the book. I think Stephen King fans might like this author...lol. (I like SK but also complain about the things I hate in this book. :) ) So I am not saying it was bad I just didn't find it to be great.

ah, gah. GAH. it’s almost 5 a.m. as i write this, and i just devoured <i>kill creek</i> in a single sitting. i almost never pull that shit off anymore. haven’t since i was first getting into stephen king, and found myself totally captured by his classic books. in fact, i’ll go ahead and be frank: i haven’t felt this scared while reading a book since the first time i read <i>’salem’s lot</i> as a young teenager.

this book isn’t perfect. characterizations of daniel and moore are a bit offensive at times, wading into fatphobic and sexist territory, respectively. daniel is never on-screen without a reference to his weight or size from the author, and moore is introduced as a manic pixie dream girl sort before, finally, one can sense the author gets a sense of who she is. still—she is often sexualized, and the male characters aren’t. it was distracting, for me, especially in the novel’s first half.

yet i can’t give this any less than 5 stars—i enjoyed the hell out of this story, was terrified in fact . . . and i am picky when it comes to haunted house tales. my favorite horror sub-genre is haunted house, but i find most modern takes on it just don’t live up to the classics. <i>kill creek</i> does.

what makes this book sing is the character work: this is a slow burn, and it’s a lengthy journey, and it’s on the characters to make the journey enjoyable. my favorite character is sebastian—many reviewers say he’s reminiscent of stephen king, and i’d agree, but he most reminds me of ramsey campbell—and his arc wholly shocked me. i guess this is the sort of book that will make readers pick a favorite character and root for them, and sebastian was that character for me.

i’m way late to the party, but i’m here now: and i can safely say i fucking loved <i>kill creek</i>, minor quibbles aside. it gave me everything i look for in horror, and more.

I really enjoyed this book. It was a little reminiscent of Hill House, in which the house itself is a character. The writing was fine, the characters were fine, with one exception, and the story was great. It's definitely a reread for me.

But what I can't get past is T.C.'s character. I mean, what the hell. She is so over the top that it's distracting. After the eighth mention of her long hair, great body, how she loves to be naked in her house, and how she's JUST SO TOUGH, I was over it.

So while the ending of the book is great, and I want to reread the book, and I'd read more by this author, T.C. is just so ridiculous that I don't know if I can deal with her again. If I do reread it, I'm going to skip some of her shit.

Sam McGarver's career could use a little help. He has gotten nowhere on his new novel, spending hours watching the cursor blink on his computer screen. Sam tells himself, and his agent, that he's concentrating on his teaching and healing from his separation, but really it's because he's rattled by the past and the present making it so that he just can't move forward. In desperation he agrees to a PR stunt for the streaming service WriteWire. The founder, Wainwright, is a billionaire's son who is desperate to make his own mark on the world. He's famous for "events" that he elaborately stages and streams to his millions of viewers worldwide. Yet he longs to be taken seriously and to that end his newest endeavor is a little more pared down yet artistically thematic. He has invited four of the most distinguished horror authors to partake in a roundtable interview on Halloween in the notorious haunted house on kill creek, last owned by the Finch sisters, and immortalized in the book Phantoms of the Prairie: A True Story of Supernatural Terror. Like Sam, the three other authors have their reasons for being there, Sebastian Cole is a legend past his prime and facing irrelevance, Daniel Slaughter is losing ground with his Christian fanbase who used to devour his teen tales of terror that always ended with a morality lesson, and T.C. Moore has been cut as screenwriter from her own book's adaptation, a book ironically called Cutter. They all expect Wainwright to pull some kind of stunt. Yet despite the cutting questions it's all above board and they leave the next morning. What happens next will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

H.P. Lovecraft, R.L. Stine, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Stephen King get together at a haunted house for a PR stunt. A clever conceit that if hewed to, instead of ending up a gore filled version of Burnt Offerings, would have set a new meta benchmark in haunted house horror. But the promise of the first few chapters, of Sam's lectures being the literary equivalent of Scream, are all but forgotten as you force yourself to just get the book over and done with. All the witty banter and badinage between the four authors is so delightful that every time the book strays from the quartet Thomas's editors should have told him to cut it because anything beyond that grouping is extraneous. I started to think that being run over by a bus wouldn't be that bad a fate because then my part in this story would be over. My main problem was that while the house is the epicenter of the evil Thomas lets the evil wander a little too far afield. The house almost becomes an afterthought while it should be the focal point, the fulcrum on which the whole book hinges. When they literally just left the house halfway through the book I was yelling at them that this isn't how it's supposed to happen. Yet while this is my main problem it is far from my only problem. You can tell this is the first book Thomas has written because it feels at times so amateurish and heavy-handed. Sam's dark secret? The mystery of the third floor bedroom? I knew what was going on the second they were mentioned. And as for the number of horror films and books he just straight up rips off? If he had kept the light, meta approach, this could have been humorous, instead it felt lazy. And as for a professional photographer using an HP PhotoSmart Printer, I'm not even going to go there.

Words fail me. KILL CREEK is extraordinary, all the more so as a debut novel of literary and psychological horror. Be not mistaken: there's plenty of the Supernatural here too, so intricately blended with the psychological horror as to become one. I read this in one day, figuratively glued to the virtual pages, and couldn't stop. My only regret is that somehow I missed reading it at the novel's 2017 release, and in fact it was the upcoming release of author Scott Thomas' second horror offering, VIOLET, that nudged me to first read KILL CREEK. I am unafraid to admit that likely I will never forget the novel's denouement concerning the House's third-floor bedroom...nor the Epilogue. Never. I will not forget KILL CREEK, and yes, I will reread it....when my nerves settle.

What caught my eye first was not the haunted house theme of the book, but the protagonists who meet in the infamous Finch House: four horror authors, lured there for some online event to discuss and promote their work. But what they get is more than they bargained for, and when they return home, something evil follows each of them...

I loved how the author created four very different faces of horror with the authors, and on top of that added the haunted house. It was fascinating to see how the house - or whatever lived in there - crept into the work of each author, while at the same time keeping their unique voices intact. Reading those different versions of the same story should be fun (though much too time-consuming).

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to spend much time reading during the last few weeks, so this story took much longer than it normally would have, it being perfect "stay up all night reading" material. The feeling I sometimes got that it dragged along was only due to the fact that I had to read it too many small portions.

An outstanding haunted house novel - highest recommendation!

When I read the synopsis for this book I knew I had to read it, I was extremely happy to find it available to request on NetGalley as was so excited when I was approved a copy.

Haunted house books are one of my favourites to read as I love the slow build up, the increasing level of spookiness and threat and how the characters respond to it.

Here we have 4 horror authors invited to the Finch House for a group interview by Wainwright, the founder of a horror website and a huge fan of all 4 authors, he thinks that having it set in the Finch House would be an amazing coup and pull in millions of views over the few days that they're all there.

Small things start happening at first, nothing too spooky or out there just little things they brush off as paranoia or their over-active imaginations, as time goes on though things start getting more serious and the story ramps up to more spooky and violent ends.

I enjoyed the characters and how they were fleshed out, the interplay between them all was well done and the story moved on at a steady pace, however, I was disappointed with the fact that there wasn't more set in the house, there is a good chunk in there but I prefer the majority of a haunted house book to be set in said house, that's just my preference though and that is why I changed my original 5 star to a 4.

*Huge thanks to Scott Thomas, Inkshares and NetGalley for this copy which I chose to read and all opinions are my own*

I received a digital ARC of this book from Netgalley.

Take The Haunting of Hill House, add a touch of Stephen King and his penchant for writer-protagonists, a pinch of social media stunts, and you'd have something like Kill Creek.

The house at Kill Creek is a bad place. Its history is full of murder and secrets, and there's a bedroom in the attic sealed behind a brick wall. So, of course, a horror fascinated social media personality is determined to use it as the backdrop for a Halloween event, featuring four famous horror writers.

There's the well respected lit-horror author, the popular writer of Christianity tinged teen thrillers, the angry woman who writes erotic, Clive Barker style gore, and the legendary old writer who no one has actually seen in years. They all take the money from the webisode that they create when they stay the night in Kill Creek, but as I'm sure you can guess, they leave the next morning changed, compelled to write about Kill Creek and the mystery of the brick wall.

Not long after, Kill Creek draws them back, and not everyone gets out alive...

This is a fun, scary haunted house story. It's not too heavy, and it isn't as deep as I think it wants to be, but it's good fun for All Hallows Read.

Kill Creek does its part to usher in the "new" era of the haunted house novel, by completely turning the sub genre inside-out. So, the idea of: four people hand-selected by a reality TV producer to spend a night in a haunted house -- isn't exactly original. And that's the point. The real horror, the haunting, the dread, the despair comes well after the opening haunted house scenes!

I'm always on the lookout for great modern ghost stories and this book sounded perfect for our library's collection. The book started very strong for me and had the classic set up of great ghost stories. It starts with a tragic and creepy backstory and then we are introduced to our main players. Each one fills the horror writer niche and you are excited to see where this all will go (although I did have some major issues with our female writer). They meet and agree to spend the night in a creepy abandoned mansion with the mysterious past. Shadows and creepy things happen and the suspense of what will happen was so strong and then.....NOTHING. They get to leave. I let out a HUGE sigh of relief when they get to leave. But it isn't over. Now start to part two....which did not grab me the same way as the first. What worked and kept you reading in the first part was the intense dread that was building. Once it was released, the book didn't have the same urgent feel to me. Although not perfect, I did enjoy this book. I think with a ghost story, the imagined horror is what makes it a great novel. The actual reveal of the horror and what is behind it just didn't have the same suspense. With that said, Scott Thomas is a great new horror writer. Recommend for libraries looking for horror and I will look out for more from the author.

Characters were well developed. The plot was intriguing. Loved the descriptiveness of the book. I would like to read more from this author

KILL CREEK transcends the haunted house trope. This is a debut novel and it shows. I started and stopped reading this book on three different occasions. The beginning is incredibly slow. So slow in fact, you can skip to the part where you get to the house. You wouldn't miss a thing. But let me go back and give you the details.

The author sets up a scenario where you have four people staying Halloween night in a so-called haunted house. The Finch House is your typical haunted house. It's located on the edge of town. It's empty, abandoned, and overgrown.

It is supposed to be a publicity stunt. Wainright (is the founder of a website dedicated to all things horror) invites four of the best horror writers to the Finch House for a live-streaming. Each author specializes in their own type of horror. T.C. Moore is an erotic horror novelist. Sam McGaver is a teacher and a struggling horror writer. Daniel Slaughter is a Christian horror writer. Sabastian Cole is the heavyweight horror writer.

While they are filming, the usual haunted house things occur. You get the noises and unexplained shadows. There is a mysterious third-floor bedroom that is bricked off, though. But nothing too out of the ordinary happens. That is when things start to pick up.

To me, my favorite part is the history of the house. I love history. I could read about historical events and places all day. Anyways, you get to see what happened in the house from the time of its construction to the present. I also like the downward spiral. SH!T. The authors begin writing a novel. Oddly, the authors reunite at the Finch House a year after their live-stream event.

Scott Thomas does a fantastic job weaving this tale of utter torment. The Finch House has a story needing to be told. KILL CREEK delivers the goods but doesn't avoid the usual tropes. The author explores the characters' backgrounds meticulously.

Scott Thomas has a unique voice and I dig his writing style. The narrative was slow at times. The characters were solid. Like I said before, you can tell this one is a debut. The tension didn't stay tight throughout. At times, the tension did build, but it wasn't lasting.

I had high hopes for the latter third of this book. I felt like the sails were taken out from under me, though. No longer did I feel the cool wind in my hair as I breezed through this book. I wanted to be surprised by the ending, but it played into a tired old trope.

If you like haunted house stories, then you should give KILL CREEK a go.

Recommend!

4/5 stars!⭐⭐⭐⭐

Scott Thomas makes one hell of a horror debut with his Stoker Award-nominated haunted house novel, Kill Creek - so strong a debut that I found it hard to believe he's a first-time author. Turns out, Thomas has a bit of a pedigree in television and was nominated for an Emmy for his work on the R.L. Stine TV series, The Haunting Hour. While Kill Creek is his first novel, Thomas definitely knows his way around a horror story, and his work here carries a nicely cinematic style with more than a few movie-ready scenes and set pieces.

After being duped into agreeing to an interview by an Internet website mogul, four authors find themselves unwittingly gathered together for an overnight stay at the abandoned and decrepit Finch House. For the wealthy Wainwright, this is a chance to speak to his idols, the modern masters of horror, and rake in lots of lucrative web-clicks. For the authors, it's a gimmicky way to promote their work, score some quick cash, and waste a night in a supposedly haunted house before returning to their lives, check in hand. If you know your way around a haunted house story, I don't have to tell you that things don't go quite according to plan...

Thankfully, Thomas throws in a few juicy curveballs here and there, slowly inching his narrative toward a finale of all-consuming madness that chills in all the best and brutal ways. Thomas, however, knows that he has to earn the premise's payoff, and he spends a lot of time building up his central cast. While the focus is on Sam McGarver, the most Everyman horror author of the bunch, characters like TC Moore, Sebastian Cole, and Daniel Slaughter - a horror-ready name if ever there was one - carry enough personality and intrigue to keep this slow-burn narrative hustling along. Moore, in fact, was my favorite character in this story - a brash, take-no-prisoners attitude, whiskey swilling, tough gal are always right up my alley narratively-speaking, and her introduction immediately captivated me.

Although it's become rather cliche to have a horror author as the protagonist of a horror novel, it works surprisingly well here. Usually the protag's occupation is ancillary, but in Kill Creek it's a primary focus and a linchpin for the work itself. Thomas is clearly well-versed in horror and genre tropes, as well as the career of writing and some of its more self-depreciating aspects. At one point, McGarver jokes that he's a writer, which means he spends most of his time procrastinating on the Internet. But it's his introduction as a college lecturer, wherein he delivers a presentation on gothic literature to his students, that makes a solid argument toward the credibility of not only McGarver's skill as an author, but Thomas's as well. The fact that Thomas creates this band of authors is one thing; the fact that he created them with such attention toward their pedigree and bibliographies is another. It's common to see horror authors experiencing a real-life horror event in fiction, but this is probably the first time I've wanted to actually read these fictional author's works. I wish I could buy a TC Moore book for my Kindle right now, or dig into a Sebastian Cole book next, and that alone should speak volumes to how much I appreciated Thomas's character work here.

Narrating Kill Creek is Bernard Setaro Clark, and hot damn, he's a fine reader. While much of his delivery is direct, Clark has a few aural tricks up his sleeve that really impressed me. Clark knows when to act up the material a bit, changing tones and pitch, and sometimes flat-out shouting, when needed. He also pulls this nifty trick of creating spatial distance between characters by turning away from the microphone at certain points. Say a character is shouting from across the room - rather than speaking directly into the mike as he would for our POV character, Clark turns away slightly, giving a sense of depth to sell the impression that there really is a character yelling from across the rom. It's such a simple thing, but so well executed, and not something I've often heard in other audiobooks. Of course, it's also possible I'm easily impressed, but I appreciated these moments a heck of a lot when they occurred. Clark's narrative skills certainly get a workout in the book's climax, as McGarver and company are forced to contend with the threats lurking within the Finch House once and for all.

Kill Creek isn't just a mighty fine haunted house novel, but a wickedly impressive debut for its author, who manages to wring the story for all its worth and deliver some pleasantly shocking twists along the way. This sucker builds like a roller coaster, slowly ratcheting its way to the top, and then violently dropping readers down a twisting thrill-ride that pulls their stomach up their throats. To put it mildly and succinctly, Kill Creek fucking rocks.

I really enjoyed this book. It was reminiscent of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I really enjoyed each of the very different characters and their oddities. There are some pretty startling twist and turns that everyone that enjoys Chillers and Thrillers will love.

WOW! WOW! WOW! Such a good ghost/haunted house/possession horror book! Why did it take me so long to read this book? I could not put it down, but when I had to I looked forward to picking it back up! Four horror authors are invited to Kill Creek, a supposed haunted house, for an interview with Wainwright and his assistant Kate. All is well, until Kill Creek "wakes up." But even after they leave Kill Creek, Kill Creek does not let them go! Their lives are not as before and in order to find out why, they have to return to Kill Creek. This was such a gripping horror novel. I am definitely going to look into from Mr. Thomas. 4.5 stars rounded to 5

This has to be the scariest haunted house story I've read in years.It reminds me of a modern day Legend Of Hell House, which I absolutely love. The author set tone of the book right from the first chapter, and kept me glued to each page right up to the inevitable end. Great book!

Kill Creek is the first novel of the author Scott Thomas. And what an impressive debut! It will surely grab your attention from the first page up to the very end. And not only it is enthralling, it is also creepy especially the first part where the characters spend their time inside the house. The story is unique on its own, as it’s not only focused on the menacing haunted house but adding the horror writers made the story more absorbing. It is curious how each one of them views the haunted house. It contains a great set of well-developed characters, too, who each has interesting stories to tell. I appreciate how each author was given time to share not only their thoughts and secrets but a snippet of their lives, as well. It may be a bit longer but totally worth it especially as the author throws in a surprise twist to the end. Kill Creek is certainly one of the best haunted house story out there and the best horror book I’ve read in a while. It is an effective horror story that will definitely appeal to the readers of the genre or someone who’s looking for a frightening read.

For a debut novel, this story was absolutely AMAZING! I love good horror stories and this one did not disappoint me.

A haunted house, 4 famous horror authors and, an internet wonder kid, what could possibly go wrong?

This book delivers along the line of Stephen King and Adam Nevill. I recommend this to all of the horror lovers out there and can not wait to see what the author gives us next!

I received a copy of this book from Netgalley.