A fun and disturbing take on a carnival horror story. Familiar quirks make this an entertaining horror story.

In the beginning, I didn't think I was going to like it. There were too many cliched characters. It was also a slow burner and I was debating on continuing. Glad I did. It was an interesting story that got better in the second half. Definitely B grade horror.

Thank you to NetGalley and J.G. Faherty for a copy of Carnival of Fear in exchange of an honest review.

What at first glance sounded like a straight-forward 'horror at the carnival' story evolved into a journey through most well-known horror genres, including aliens, zombies, werewolves, vampires and more. We follow a group of high-school kids as they visit the Halloween carnival that has come to town, and once they enter the house of horrors, the true nightmare begins as they have to fight for their lives against very real monsters.
While I was truly impressed by the elaborate plot and the construction of the horror house, once people entered it I was not that surprised anymore. Each scenario felt predictable and stereotyped like a copy of some well-known novel or movie. At first, I was overwhelmed by the multitude of characters and struggled to distinguish them from each other, though later on I understood that the story required a lot of 'cannon fodder', while some main characters remained. In the end, the book felt like a collection of loosely connected short stories covering the top horror genres.

The carnival of fear by JG Faherty.
The carnival is in town... What was supposed to be an evening of fun and laughter for JD Cole and the other students of Whitebridge High turns into a never-ending night of terror. Trapped inside the Castle of Horrors by the demonic Proprietor, good friends and bitter rivals must band together to make it through the maze of torturous attractions, where fictional monsters come to life, eager to feast on human flesh. Vampires, zombies, werewolves, and aliens lurk around every corner as JD and his friends struggle from one room to the next, fighting for their sanity, fighting to survive, fighting to escape ... The Carnival of Fear.
This was a fantastic read with some great characters. It was a little slow in places. 4*.

Great story. I love this 80's type of book. The characters were fun and the book was fast and easy to read.

Solid read. Trigger warnings due to some content in the story. A little long, but pretty good read around Halloween.

A fun, creepy story that would be a good choice to read around Halloween time. Recommended for readers who enjoy 80s style horror.

Lots of fun , well developed characters in a nightmare situations. The perfect Halloween read. What’s your idea of Hell? Chances are, if you enter this particular Halloween carnival, you’ll find yourself inside it. The twisted haunted house is nothing shy of horror movie worthy and an utterly genius device that should be a blockbuster in the near future. So much fun, so many twists and turns! Great for a fan of Saw, because no one is fully innocent, every character has flaws, human flaws, and they all suffer for them, some far worse than others. My only regret is that the main villain deserved more fleshing out and focus than he received, but still an amazing read, a horror icon worthy delight.

Carnival of Fear by J.G. Flaherty was received direct from the publisher. As others have stated, while not an original concept, I was excited to get into this book and see if it was worth my while, which it was.  We used to a have a carnival roll into town once a year and I could only wish stuff had happened in our town like happened in this book.  As always, I will not go into the plot but if you, or someone you buy books for, likes grade B movies with chills and thrills that take place around Halloween, certainly buy this book as a quick read during the holiday season.

4 Stars

I am not going to rate this book as the format makes it difficult to read. It wouldn’t be fair to review a book I can’t read.

My experience of carnivals is that it lasts more than one night and occurs in the summer. As the students from Whitebridge High go home they see the sign for a carnival that will be there for one night only. One of the attractions is a haunted castle. J.D. Cole and his girlfriend decide to experience it. Once in, they discover that they must go into each room before they can exit the castle. As they go through each room, they do their best to survive each room. Some don’t. As J.D. and the others go in the different rooms, they discover that if they don’t work as a team, they may not get out. Who will survive? Will they be able to find the exit and leave?

As I read this novel, I found myself wanting to know what was going to happen in each room. I held my breath at times as it appeared no one was going to leave a room. Some of the rooms had experiencesi would never had thought of which was a pleasant surprise for me. The action in the novel is nonstop. The characters are believable as well as the carnival itself. If you like horror, don’t miss this book! Enjoy the read!

The imagery of this book is absolutely awesome, beginning in the first few pages when a carnival drops out of a black circle in the sky. You can just smell the funnel cakes and see the game booths and demon vendors in your mind it’s described so well. A group of teens are picked out due to their sins and adversity to each other and are forced to visit each and every room of horror before they can escape, if they make it out at all. The motives of the carnival “proprietor” are made clearer as the book goes on. Pretty much every creature from horror stories is visited, and if you happen to come across this around October (like I did), it makes a great book for that time of year. It has you on the edge of your seat near the end, even if you suspect how things will turn out. It also has a solid ending, so you won’t have to worry about looking for a sequel as soon as you’re done, but I’ll be looking for more books from this author.

Trigger warnings for sexual assault and a school shooting.

I was looking forward to a fun B grade horror experience with this book and that’s mostly what I got. It’s almost Halloween and ‘Carnival of Fear’ is in town for one night only. Advertisements promise “Terror! Blood! Mayhem! Monsters, Ghouls, and Murderers! Experience the agony of the damned!” and “The World’s Most Terrifying Haunted Mansion! Enter At Your Own Risk!” They’re not lying!

Several groups of high school students are amongst those who are inside the Castle of Horrors at midnight when hell begins to literally break loose on the town of Whitebridge.

“It’s not like a regular haunted house. There’s only one exit, and you can’t get out until you go through all the rooms. You can do them in any order you want, except for the last one. That’s where the exit is.”

The characters are so clichéd that they’re essentially caricatures. You’ve got the jocks, the cheerleader, the nerds and the goody two shoes. I eagerly anticipated a lot of the characters’ death scenes from our first meeting, particularly those who spouted derogatory homophobic, racist, ableist, misogynist word vomit. I was also keen for the date rapist to be dispatched with the ample blood spatter he deserved.

I had planned on keeping track of all the deaths in the book in order to provide a body count in my review. There were so many that I decided to make up rules about which deaths could be included. They had to happen on page, so no dead bodies that were stumbled upon once they’d already started cooling, and I had to know their name for them to count. Before I made it a third of the way through the book I had already reached double digits so I decided to abandon my tally and just sit back and enjoy the bloodbath instead.

I grinned as B grade horror glory unfolded in front of me. There were some really entertaining over the top deaths. I witnessed a Jason Voorhees/Leatherface mashup, scenes from Alien and every alien invasion movie ever made, witch trials, Frankenstein at work, werewolves and zombies. I was really enjoying being ringside but then, just before 70%, I almost stopped reading. I’m all for slasher bloodshed. I’ll happily cheer on decapitations, limbs getting twisted off bodies, disembowelments and impalements, especially when they happen to a character I love to hate. It’s all part of the fun of B grade horror.

However, the story stopped being fun the moment [SPOILER - the vampires started raping at whim. Both male and female characters experienced this, with some rapes happening in full view of the rest of the characters. I hesitated in the beginning when one of the main characters was described as a date rapist but tried to ignore this and simply looked forward to their demise. The story lost me at the first gratuitous sexual assault and while I continued reading until the end, I never got the fun back - SPOILER]. This may not impact on the enjoyment of the story for other readers but personally I felt the topic wasn’t dealt with sensitively at all and didn’t belong in the book in the first place. Its inclusion transformed Carnival of Fear from a fun Halloween read into something I would no longer recommend, which is a shame because the rest of the book was entertaining. Without those scenes I would definitely recommend it to people who enjoy B grade horror.

I may have missed something but it seemed like the castle rules changed after midnight. Early on we find out that in order to enter the final room you have to have already completed every other room. There isn’t a single character who enters every room after midnight, yet once at least someone has survived each room those who are left are all allowed to enter the final room.

This book would benefit from a proofreader and some further editing. Some of the writing was fairly crude and there are quite a few typos that hadn’t been corrected in the 2015 version I read. For example, ‘lightning’ is spelt correctly twice. I found it spelt ‘lighting’ once and ‘lightening’ four times. Some repetition also stood out, including “like a shark eats a seal” in chapter 8 and “Like sharks attacking a seal” in chapter 18.

Thank you to NetGalley and Victory Editing for the opportunity to read this book.

Carnival of Fear happens in one night, it follows a bunch of teenage school kids through their worst fears after they all attend the same mysterious Halloween carnival, and if they don't succeed and overcome what they fear the most, the carnival could very well destroy the town, maybe even the world. Once in the carnival they all end up heading for the haunted castle attraction, gaining admittance just as the midnight bell tolls. The students find themselves in a castle with various doors, all with their own theme, from the Salem witch trials, to a zombie apocalypse, and even an alien invasion among others. To exit, they must go through every room and make it out. Can they do it?

So, when I first started reading this I was ready to straight up give it a 2 out of 5, the last quarter of the book has me bumping that up to a 3.5. The beginning moved kinda slow, but once the story hit roughly the 35% mark, the pace picked up a bit. Though I still feel like it took a stupid amount of time to get through the book, even when the pacing picked up. I'm not sure why that is...

In the beginning, we're introduced to a few different groups of kids, the stereotypical ones, you have the jocks and cheerleaders, the nerds, the stoners, and the perfect couple. When we're meeting all of these characters, I couldn't help but wonder why there was so many, even after finishing it, I'm still not too sure why there was so many, but I guess it kinda worked. Along with the stereotypical cliques, we had some stereotypical characters that grated on me pretty bad. We had the 'gangsta' African American jock, who seemed to take please in sexual harassment and rape, and who's dialogue was written in the stereotypical way, using words along the lines of "a'aight" and so on, which really annoyed me, I'm not really the biggest fan of writing accents like that in, that said, I believe that Hagrad's works perfectly and shouldn't be written any other way, so I'm not entirely sure why it pissed me off. We also had the Latino girl who's dialogue was peppered with "papi", "chica" etc, this also irritated me, see above. I just felt that this was pigeon holing these characters SO much, that they were pretty one dimensional, I understand that the author wanted to get his visions of these characters across, but it just didn't work for me.

At the start, the story has SO many paths in it that I had a little trouble keeping up, once the pace picked up around 35%, I found the stories easier to follow and they seemed to have become more linear, which made it easier to read. There was so much happening in this book, and I did enjoy it, but feel like the author could have gone over the story again and maybe done it differently? I'm not sure how it would've worked though because if each of the rooms in the haunted castle were divided up into individual novellas, I would've been so annoyed at not being able to follow straight on, yet it felt like there was sometimes too much going on in the novel. Once the characters all end up together it worked even better, and it was a great display of people being able to show their true colours in a life threatening situation, and realising that there is more to life than what happens at school.

I actually first thought that this might've been written for a younger audience, or perhaps been a creative writing assignment for school, then I realised that this was first published in 2010, and it began to make a bit more sense, I'm sure that the author has developed their voice a lot since this story's original release. The realisation that this wasn't written for a younger audience hit me in the face when the swearing made an appearance, and then shortly after, the various instances of rape. I had an "oh my" moment, then realised "yep, this is definitely geared towards an older audience."

I found myself becoming attached to a few of the characters and was rooting for them through the last two thirds of the book. The creatures were well written, and the individual room themes themselves were very well thought out and diverse which was great.

I'd be interested to read something more recent by this author as I feel they have a brilliant imagination and are not afraid to 'go there' with their horror themes.

SLOW BUILD, SLIGHT PAYOFF

In looking into the author of this book, J.G. Faherty, I found that the book is a reissue of his first novel. That would explain a lot and make the flaws with the book understandable. As the book itself progresses it gets better. My feelings are that the same holds true for Mr. Faherty’s other novels.

The story involves a carnival that appears every Halloween in a different town, populated by demons in search of souls and longing for the midnight hour when their powers grow. Also helping them to gain power are the souls that they devour. In particular this night is a group of teens, all having those normal teenage difficulties ranging from ex-boyfriend/girlfriend, social status in the group and more. The way they behave and the choices they make will determine if the carnival has the ability to devour the entire town or if it will be limited to the few souls it takes should the group come out on top.

It’s an interesting concept and works well one the journey through the castle of horror style ride the kids enter begins. Each room there offers a different style of horror for them to confront. The thing is the concept has been used similarly in the movie WAXWORK. But if you enjoy horror novels you can excuse that.

The issues I found with the book were in the earlier pages. To begin with it felt like there were far too many characters being discussed. This was followed up by them all being the stereotypical type of characters we’re all too familiar with. The jocks are jerks, the cheerleaders pretty and snobs, the tech guys geeks and the hero and heroine as close to perfect as you’ll find in these type of groups. The familiarity might help with some but for me felt like the easy way out.

The carnival itself is a nice idea to use for the roaming evil to move from town to town. The images of an evil carnival barker or worker are easy to imagine. But little time is spent with them, more often asides rather than the focus. That is held for the castle of terror type ride.

In the end the book was enjoyable enough but if your qualms rank with mine you’ll find it slow going at first. My recommendation is that you stick with it and the end product will not disappoint by the end as much as you might fear it will at the start. Fewer clichés and more of the original stuff will make Faherty a better writer and my hope is that this is what happened after this first effort. Writing is a difficult task and one has to give him credit for presenting us this piece of work.

Scary, Intriguing, Unique!
The first few chapters introduced so many characters, I thought I wouldn't be able to keep up with them. But as the story progressed, the characters felt real and easier to understand. The narration is distinctive and it just makes the reading experience a great one. No typical horror movie characters, the thing that impressed me. The story is about a carnival, as the name suggests, where nothing is what it seems. Everyone is interested in the house of horrors but it takes them to a different world. Scary fun!

Description
What was supposed to be an evening of fun and laughter for JD Cole and the other students of Whitebridge High turns into a never-ending night of terror. Trapped inside the Castle of Horrors by the demonic Proprietor, good friends and bitter rivals must band together to make it through the maze of torturous attractions, where fictional monsters come to life, eager to feast on human flesh.

Vampires, zombies werewolves, and aliens lurk around every corner as JD and his friends struggle from one room to the next before their final showdown with Satan himself. In the end, the few who survive are left wondering if they have defeated the Carnival forever, or if it will be back next year.


Was it spectacular? No. Was it a fun, spooky read for a Sunday afternoon? Yes
I take books like these in the spirit in which they were written. Fun, engaging, and a little silly. It was fun, had all the right monsters, and maybe even a lesson or two.

Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy. My reviews are my own

This book could have benefited from writer’s workshop feedback. The dialogue and writing just weren’t in a style that I enjoy.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free copy of this ebook in exchange for an unbiased review.