I picked this book up very excited to read it because the story line sounded so fun and creepy. This book sort of fell short on that for me. To me there was more focus on the main characters addiction to Xanax and her voices talking to her then anything else. I would have liked to have read more about her imaginary friend!

Many years ago Kris lost her mother to cancer while at their family lake house. Yet she remembers the lake house as a place of comfort. It is for that reason that she packs up her daughter Sadie and heads out to this long abandoned home in hopes of helping Sadie recover from the recent loss of her father. Time may have colored Kris's memories because they are far more cloudy than the waters of the crystal clear lake.
I picked up this book not only because of the description but because I loved the author's previous work "Kill Creek." After reading Violet I can now say that Scott Thomas is on my list of must read authors. Violet took me to a place of great emotional turmoil. It is a story of love and loss, and much of the first half focuses on the way our own minds try to deal with traumatic events. Gradually this story moves from unnerving to frightening as Kris Barlow remembers her past through her daughter's eyes. There is something at the lake house that Kris has forgotten, but it remembers her, and has been waiting for her return.
5 out of 5 stars

Thank you to NetGalley, Inkshares, and of course Mr. Schott Thomas for the Advance Reader Copy of “Violet” I was really excited for the new novel after reading the debut “Kill Creek” last year.
There are some similarities here with Violet, returning to an old home, and whether it is the home or relationships that are the true horror. For me, the horror that is a metaphor for human relationships and being redeemed or saved are usually the novels that I enjoy the most. Like Kill Creek, Violet is also in the literate horror genre. I have seen some reviews that feel that the author spends too much time on the details and or idiosyncrasies of the characters, but I feel those details help describe or define who the characters are. It is the story of Katie and her daughter Sadie, moving back to the childhood lake house of Katie. There were tragedies in the past for Katie, and a recent tragedy for both the mother and daughter by losing their Husband/Father. The novel plays out as a story of loss and how Katie and Sadie come to terms with the tragedies without losing each other. If you like literate horror, there is everything you want here, tension and atmosphere, but also characters that you can invest in. Thank you for taking the time to read this review. The novel “Violet” will be released by Inkshare on September 24, 2019. Happy Reading. #violet #netgalley #scottthomas

After the tragic death of her husband Jonah, Kris Barlow tries to escape along with her daughter Sadie to a family summer house in the small town of Pacington, Kansas where Kris herself had spent a summer when she was just ten years old with her father and dying mother. Kris has a lot of fond memories of the lake house and the town, and hopes that a summer adventure will help both her and Sadie to deal with the grief and pain of losing Jonah.
However things are not as she remembers them with her childhood lake house being left to rot and the town dwindling. Kris is not willing to let her memories go and sets on a quest to make this work.
Soon Kris has to face her own fears and her long abandoned imaginary friend.

This is so much more than just a horror story, it connects real life experiences with supernatural forces.
Overall I enjoyed this book, however it might come out as too slow for some readers. I prefer slower paced stories and liked the build up. At places the book felt unnecessarily detailed especially for a few moments that do not contribute much to the story or plot development. The long and often tedious describtion of some scenes can get distracting as it takes away the attention from the important parts. This style does create the needed atmosphere and unsettling feeling, as it shows the struggle of the characters in accepting and dealing with the pain of losing a loved one. But maybe it had to be trimmed down a bit to ease the flow.

The characters fell flat and detached at moments, however I can contribute this to the storyline of denial.
Kris only remembers the good parts, the happy moments as she rejects the reality of her past and mother slowly dying from cancer- a scarry and devastating illnes especially for a young child. She takes irrational desicions and keeps pushing her idea of a getaway even when it looks like it's not working the way she hoped. One of the strongest points throughout the book is the way Kris slowly remembers, bit by bit what really happened back then, tying the memories of her happy summer to the mysterious events and eventually accepting the truth, which allows her to finally move on.
Her relationship with Sadie feels a bit shallow at times as well, however grief and pain do manifest differently in each person and their awkward interactions might be the result of just that.


In the end I liked this book, it's a good read that I highly recommend. I would definely be checking Kill Creek now and following Scott Thomas for any future works.


*** Many thanks to NetGalley and to the publisher Inkshares for providing me with an electronic ARC of Violet in exchange of my honest review.***

Violet was, overall, a good book, in my opinion. The characters hooked me almost immediately, and as they were the primary focus throughout the book, it was difficult for me to put down.

This novel was definitely a slow-burning ghost story, emphasis on SLOW. At times this meant anticipating an occurrence for hours on end without any actual fulfillment. At others, it was just grueling and a bit more difficult to read than the usual book.

I don't want to spoil anything so I will just leave it at this-if you enjoy very slow burning books with fantastic description and an intriguing plot, this is for you. While I really enjoyed the story itself, the pace really got in the way at times.

After reading the book’s description I expected something more, something interesting. I’ve read the first 30% of the book and still nothing happened. I just couldn’t care less about the characters either.

I received a copy from the publisher through NetGalley. Thank you.

Scott Thomas negotiates the often dreaded second novel in
style with a slow burning ghost story based around grief

Scott Thomas follows his outstanding debut Kill Creek with a slow-burner, Violet, although it never quite reaches the heights of its predecessor it is a fine ghost story. At first glance Kill Creek had a well-trodden story; famous horror authors spend time in a notoriously haunted house, with that horror trope morphing into something much more complex and original. Violet does not have this highly successful double-tap and is a more traditional ghost story. However, I thoroughly enjoyed it and it cements the reputation of Scott Thomas as an author of high calibre and one to watch in the world of dark fiction. It also successfully negotiates the, often tricky, second novel with relative ease.

The action opens with a prologue which felt slightly unnecessary; the revelation that the down-at-heel lakeside resort town of Pacington has a dark history connected to the Verdigris River and the Lost Lake where the story takes place. There is no need for foreshadowing in Violet, the prologue ticks that box and does slightly kill the suspense. One wonders whether this backstory was truly necessary? It does, however, provide context for the slow-burning story that lies ahead.

Before I get into the plot I must mention the many wonderful music references the book has; some of which are chapter titles, the first being “There is a light that never goes out” which is a song by cult English eighties indie band The Smiths. Early in the novel Kris Barlow finds an old home-made cassette which belonged to her mother, which she hasn’t heard in thirty years, and in a small way rediscovers her mother through the music. I still play many old cassette mix tapes from the eighties and nineties and I can identify with rediscovering a cassette from years earlier and instantly remembering the track listening and memories associated to particular songs. This subliminal thread which went through the story was a music-lovers dream and I really appreciated it.

After the prologue we meet main character, Kris, who is having a flashback to the coroner’s office where she identified the body of her husband, Jonah Barlow, after a fatal car crash. The circumstances of the crash remain shrouded until well into the novel but play a large part in Kris’s fragile state of mind and the problems they faced in their marriage. Violet is a story predominately told in the third person from Violet’s point of view, with the only deviation being her eight-year-old daughter Sadie, whose voice is used more as the novel develops.

For large parts of the story, and considering it was a long book, Kris and Sadie are the only two characters featured, so the author did a fine job keeping the story moving, although I did wonder whether it was slightly too long. The relationship of the mother and daughter was the backbone of the novel, but there was a lot of it. Sadie has struggled to cope with the death of her father and the scenes where Kris is helpful to help her daughter cope with the emotional pain were handled exceptionally well and at were times gruelling.

Kris and Sadie arrive in Pacington to spent the summer in her late father’s summer house, which she has not visited since she was a child. They find it in a terrible condition, so rundown Sadie does not want to stay there. As they begin to fix the place up Sadie settles slightly and we realise that Kris has problems both with her nerves and prescription drugs, as she is a vet, has been self-medicating. Will this dilapidated holiday home become the fresh start the mother and daughter need? Highly unlikely.

This was a very slow book and undoubtedly too slow for some readers and if you’re after gore, murder and mayhem then look elsewhere. However, I was happy to go with the flow as it slowly moved into supernatural territory. This aspect of the novel did not break into any new ground, however, Scott Thomas does integrate numerous other layers into the mix, including; small town secrets, childhood loneliness, trauma, invisible friends and memories. The latter is a big one and poses a good question; how much can we trust our own childhood memories? Can we kid ourselves into believing we had a happy childhood? Can we end up believing our own lies to the extent that we think they are true? Much of this is connected to what happened to Kris when she stayed in the house as a child.

There is a second, interconnected, main plotline which Kris becomes obsessed into researching; the disappearance and deaths of several little girls over a number of years, with some of the bodies being discovered close to their house. Adding in a policeman, the psychologist and the bookshop owner there are few other characters in the book. The scenes with the psychologist were particularly good and were an excellent device with connecting with the childhood version of Kris.

Scott Thomas should be complemented for writing a ghost story which is completely different from Kill Creek and he set the bar very high for his second novel. Although I enjoyed Violet and am happy to recommend it, coming in at 446 pages some readers will struggle with its length and pace. It will depend on which type of horror individual readers are attracted to. Although it was very good, it fell short of knocking me out, I read a lot of supernatural stories and thus far in 2019 Andrew Cull’s recently released Remains has that particular top honour. That story was a brutal nerve-shredding 200 pages and also dealt with loss and ‘remains’ my supernatural novel of the year, thus far.

Super visual! I couldn’t tell if I was reading a book or an actual screen play. I enjoyed the way the story unfolded. It feels like a really slow burn at first, and at some points I did wonder if this was going to pick up in pace. It did about half way through, and the was absolutely worth the wait. Also, the way the author used song references and descriptions of things made this feel very much like a movie or show, so the reference to screen play above was not a joke. I give this 3.5 stars, as some editing is still needed to get it 100% polished and consumer ready.

Two soooo loooonggg, never ever ending, boring pages , I felt like waiting for Godot as I was waiting for something mysterious was about to happen on this book stars!

Guilty as charged, I shouldn't request this book before checking the page numbers! Honestly, I never had problem to read long books before. I read " The Stand", " Tommyknockers", , whole seven books of " Dark Tower" series ( also all the last books of Mr. King were around 600 pages long), but unfortunately this is not a King book. And at least half of it are needed to be edited!

The slow pacing, especially boring starting till the half of it made me lost. I haven't yawned so much since I have watched last 30 minutes of " Meet Joe Black"

There are too many heavy and depressing issues could be found in those pages starting from car accident, suicide, mental illness, animal deaths, severe illness, traumas. But all those elements weren't used probably to give us creeps, force to be hooked on pages. They were like combination of bad events stuck into our minds and went nowhere!

The story development was not interesting and choosing the lake house, loner mother and daughter combination is not a surprising or unconventional, different combination to start a story. I found mother and daughter a little bit dull and I was expecting more spooky, chilling, terrifying or supernatural atmosphere surrounded them. But I got nothing.

The book has so much potential and great horrific elements are ready to be developed. But unfortunately all of them wasted.
So as a horror book fan, I got really disappointed.

Thanks to Inkshares and NetGalley to share the ARCCOPY with me in exchange my honest review! I wish I could like this one.

I already enjoyed Kill Creek but this was something else. This is more of a slow burner and the horror is more subtle wich makes it so much more creepy.
The story takes a while before it really takes off but I feel this pace is needed to really build the characters and their stories and the increasing sense of dread, of something evil that is haunting this seemingly peaceful little town of Pacington.
Highly recommended!

Thanks to NetGalley and Inkshares for this ebook!

**Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher, Inkshares, for providing me with a free eARC in exchange for my honest review.**

I'll start by stating that if I could rate half stars I would have truthfully given this book a 3.5 out of 5 instead of just a 3 out of 5.

Violet by Scott Thomas is a chilling supernatural tale full of beautiful metaphors and poignant symbolism for the struggles of grief and the process of healing.

We follow Kris and Sadie, a mother and daughter, to the small town of Pacington, Kansas. They promise a summer full of adventure to distract themselves from the ever looming presence of their recent loss of Jonah, their husband and father, respectively. Things don't go quite as expected, though. As they arrive to their family's old summer lake house they find it in complete disarray, seemingly abandoned many years ago. However this doesn't dissuade Kris. She's determined to restore her old summer getaway spot to its former glory and hoping that she and Sadie can find some sense of normalcy to cling to along the way.

"Gold fire burned a line across the horizon, melting away the night. Soon the deep blue would fade like a bruise, and the sky would become a robin’s egg , its color swept away in places by wisps of white cloud."

Thomas carefully crafts sentences with expert attention to details and imagery, giving even readers with the most lackluster imagination the ability to see River's End lake house for themselves. Thomas breathes life into this novel in a way that draws the reader into this world of Kris and Sadie's and keeps you tethered, picturing every detail from the first page to the very last one.

"It was not dirt that was caking the glass, that was keeping the sunshine from fully penetrating. It was countless smudges, the same odd shape stacked one upon the other... A flat center, about the size of a silver dollar.Thin lines stretching out from this. Four on top. A smaller one off to the side. Fingers, she realized. And the silver dollars were the flat smudges of palms. They were handprints. Countless little handprints... They were on the inside. Tens. Hundreds. Thousands of handprints. Small, like a child’s."

Violet is one of the spookiest books I've read in the past year or so. It's filled with strange encounters and never fails to raise goosebumps or tickle the little hairs on the back of your neck. Events that can't quite be explained, but are so innocuous, seemingly without consequences, continue to occur as the plot moves along and there isn't always an answer right away, but the threads begin to weave together the closer we get to the end. Kris herself uses the example of putting a puzzle together, piece by piece the picture becomes clearer until we can finally see the entire image for what it truly is. And sometimes, the final picture isn't what we thought it was at all, but it makes perfect sense of every detail we've been analyzing on the individual pieces.

Thomas does a phenomenal job of weaving a complicated web of characters, events both past and present, and theories for the reader that it's impossible not to keep page turning until you've figured it out for yourself. Until you've sat down and finished the puzzle and can see the final, clear image of Kris and Sadie's story.

"She scanned the label on the side of the bottle. Quantity: 80. Eighty pills when the prescription was filled... Even if she gave herself the benefit of the doubt and said she had arrived with sixty pills, over the course of fourteen days that was about four pills a day. And she knew for a fact that in the beginning, she was only taking two per day. That had been the deal she made with herself. Those were the rules. There was only one explanation. In the past week, there had been days when she popped five or six in a twenty-four-hour period."

Pacington isn't quite how Kris remembered it. Her thirty year absence was long enough for a once vibrant town to age just as she had and Kris has a lot of truths to swallow about the people and places in her life. The little lost girls of Pacington, the reason why Jonah died, Sadie's strange behavior and her imaginary friend, and Kris's own descent to the bottoms of wine and pill bottles. We see the fragility of a suddenly single mother, the innocence lost upon a child who has learned too early that death stops for no one, and the cracks in Kris's mental foundation are not too difficult to spot. As you progress through the novel you may even begin to wonder if the things happening, the things Kris is seeing, if they are even truly real or perhaps just a side effect of self medicating? The only way forward is to face and accept the past, but you're never quite sure if Kris can do it, or if she'll end up as another lost girl drifting around Lost Lake.

The biggest downfall of the novel is also one of the things I have praised it for, which is attention to detail. While it is marvelous for the slow burning suspense that makes this such a fascinating read, it can also heavily bog down moments that truthfully could have been slimmed down to make this a more palatable read. I discovered when trying to pull quotes from the novel to use as examples that I had trouble doing so as they would have easily taken up my entire review. Cutting them down was difficult as the points they were making were often squished between phrases that felt as though Thomas was being paid by the word Charles Dickens style.

It's also worth noting that the relationship between Kris and Sadie feels a little shallow. We hardly see them interact outside of cleaning or being in immediate danger and it's hard to gauge if this was meant to show that they indeed have a strained relationship or if it's due to a lack of understanding of the mother daughter bond.

Overall, I would still recommend Violet if you enjoy horror novels. I will state that if you are not comfortable reading about substance abuse and death, including the deaths of small children, then you may want to give this one a pass as it does describe these things in vivid detail.

Scott Thomas follows up his excellent debut with this slow-burn horror novel about a woman haunted by a long-forgotten imaginary friend.
A story about grief and loss, it follows the tale of mother Kris Parker, who returns to her family's run-down summer lake house with her daughter following her husband's death. But Kris soon discovers that the house has been the focal point for a string of disappearances of young girls in recent years and her own family soon becomes the focus of a dark presence.
Where Kill Creek was plot driven, this is much more of a character piece and unwinds slowly before cranking up the scares in a strong final act. Thomas proves he is adept at creating characters you care about, which only heightens the tension as the danger cranks up.
It's another solid entry from the screenwriter turned novelist and makes him a rising talent in the horror genre.

Kill Creek was and is one of my all time favourite haunted house novels so I was beyond excited to read Scott Thomas' follow up, Violet. Only this time it's not the house that's haunted it's the main character, Kris. While Kill Creek was a gut punch of constant action and plot Violet is a far more considered character driven novel dealing with, among other things, grief and the death of community.
In many ways it's a beautiful yet heartbreaking novel, more than once I was moved to tears as more and more of Kris's psyche is laid bare.
Remarkable stuff.

DNF 26%

The writing is so detailed it's painful. Every single move is chronicled and I'm so bored I can't take it anymore.

I feel like I'm reading a script.

Here's a sample:

"She did a quick pass over her bottom teeth and spat a bubbly mixture of toothpaste and saliva into the sink. Cupping a hand under the faucet, she slurped cool water into her mouth. She spat the water out and rinsed the sink before turning the faucet off."

THE ENTIRE STORY IS LIKE THIS.

I mean, a simple "She brushed her teeth." would have sufficed. Amiright?

At 26%, one day has passed that consisted of cleaning house. Imagine the amount of detail involved in describing a house cleaning. Ugh.



I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Read only 100 or so pages of this book. Boring, characters were cardboard. Absolutely nothing happened in those 100 pages to hold my interest.

Let me say first that I have been looking forward to Scott Thomas's next book since the moment I finished reading his first book, Kill Creek. In the meantime, I began to worry if Violet would live up to what I wanted it to be? So while I was so excited when I was approved by NetGalley to read this, I was nervous. What if Scott Thomas had a sophomore slump? What if he's a one hit wonder? Turns out, I had nothing to worry about. Violet, and Scott Thomas, exceeded my huge expectations.

Violet is an achievement. The tension is set from the very first page. The first, probably, half of the book is ALL foreboding and anxiety inducing set up. After all, you know that there's this imaginary friend/ghost that's going to show up and you're just waiting for it to happen. Violet is like the shark from Jaws, you don't meet her until well into the story but you can FEEL her presence over the entire plot. She's there, in the darkness, watching, waiting, wanting to play. When she does show up, she SHOWS THE HELL UP. I could not put Violet down for the last half of the book. She sunk her hooks in and I needed to know all about her. I needed to hear her song until the end of the epilogue.

This book is better than Kill Creek and Kill Creek was my book of the year when it came out. You need to read this brilliant, scary, beautiful book. Get it in your brain.

“It was an abandoned place full of haunted people. She could not let herself become one of them.”

I received a free e-ARC through NetGalley from the publishers at Inkshares. Trigger warnings: death, death of a child/parent/spouse, suicide, animal death (graphic/on-page), car accident, drowning, severe illness, severe injury, cancer, gore, body horror, bug horror, trauma, guns, mental illness, depression, blood.

Shortly after Kris Barlow’s husband is killed in a gruesome car accident, she and her daughter, Sadie, flee to her childhood lake house in the small town of Pacington. She’s convinced the lake house will be a fresh start and a chance to escape the pitying looks of friends and family, but Kris’s own happy memories there are overshadowed by her mother’s traumatic death from cancer. Things are not as she remembers them in Pacington. The house has fallen into disrepair, and missing children and mysterious deaths haunt the town. When Sadie begins pulling away, talking to herself and disappearing for hours into the old storage room Kris used as a playroom, it stirs memories of an old childhood friend–one who may still be waiting for Kris to return.

There’s no reason in the world this book should be almost five hundred pages. There’s not a trace of the spooky or the supernatural for the entire first half and, instead, we’re treated to numerous scenes of Kris’s cleaning and pointless, over-indulgent descriptions and labored metaphors of the property and the lake house, down to the last blade of grass. If Thomas was trying to paint a picture, he needn’t have tried so hard, since there’s absolutely nothing extraordinary about the lake house, the town, or the people who live there. It’s clear the editor needed to take a firmer hand. If it’s not relevant to the character or plot development, we don’t need a description of it.

You would think a novel with so much imagery would be atmospheric, but instead it’s just dull. There’s no sense of menace from the house, except for the fact that it should probably be condemned, and the characters are equally flat. I’m tired of male authors who think they can write plausible mother/daughter relationships; Kris and Sadie’s constantly rang hollow for me, and they’re basically cardboard cutouts of every mother/daughter pair in any thriller ever. Kris is self-absorbed and abusing her medications while she slowly loses her grip on reality, and Sadie’s voice is gratingly simplistic. Per every other thriller, she doesn’t start fighting for her daughter until it’s almost too late, which is as baffling here as it is in every other novel. I’m pretty sure I have more protective instincts for a complete stranger than these fictional mothers have for their own children, no matter what crisis is happening (especially when a crisis is happening).

Which is all really a shame because this might have been an interesting story without all the distractions. Thanks to the over-writing, every plot reveal is painfully obvious, but the horror is compelling when it finally kicks in. The bones of the story, which links the power of grief with imaginary friends, is a good one, and I wish we’d gotten more of it. Instead, it goes from zero to eighty as the moment Kris realizes what’s happening, she and Sadie are suddenly in mortal danger. The ending is entertaining enough, but there was probably a better way to tell this story.

I review regularly at brightbeautifulthings.tumblr.com.

I wish I could say that I liked this book more than I did, but I have to be honest. I really enjoyed the writing style of the author. He can lyrically describe the view from a window, the grief of a parent, or the death of an animal in a way that is both beautiful and tragic and unsettling. The three stars that I gave the book are entirely based on how much I enjoyed the author's writing and my appreciation for what he attempted to do with this book. Unfortunately, no amount of appreciation can cover up the fact that this is essentially a 450 page story that feels bloated with unnecessary characters, unexplored plot points, and a story that doesn't come together until the last 50 pages.

There is a scene involving the death of a horse that really embodies what I felt was wrong with the book. It is a horrific scene that stands out as being unnecessarily grotesque for no other reason than the author felt the reader needed a jolt of gore to remind them that they were, in fact, reading a "horror novel." You could argue that the scene was necessary to remind the reader that the parents of the missing children of Pacington were shattered people sleepwalking through life with only the fading memories and dying pets to remind them of the happiness they had lost, but we already knew these were broken people. The only purpose the scene could serve was to show the malevolence of the supernatural force that haunts the town, but if there is a supernatural connection to the death of the horse, it is never explained and it makes no sense with what we learn about the supernatural entity later.

Thematically, I get what the author was doing - the slow death of small towns in rural America, the dangers of suppressing grief, how internalizing pain can destroy the people we love. Unfortunately, the story is bloated and meanders and takes way too long to get to the point. I was reminded of "The Ocean at the End of the Lane" while I was reading "Violet". Thematically the two books are similar, but Neil Gaiman's book is around half the length and never wastes the readers time.

Sometimes more is better, but sometimes it's just more.

Violet tells an amazing story of how grief can grow into a rot that can spread across your life and that of others. Kris Barlow first lost her mother to cancer at the tender age of ten and has now lost her husband at 41 years old. Calling to mind a romanticised, nostalgic summer lake house retreat her parents owned, Kris remembers how the house helped her overcome her former grief and therefore decides to return, taking her 8 year old daughter with her. But the lake house is neglected, the town isn't thriving any more, girls have gone missing and her daughter is suddenly laughing and enjoying life with not a care in the world. Thomas writes this horror story as a slow burner so much so, that I forgot it was a horror as I was so invested in Kris and her daughter's struggle to survive the recent death. When the horror did hit, it hit hard, because I was so distracted! This ability makes this novel a stand out horror novel for me. At the end of the book, in the acknowledgements, Thomas states that his father had cancer and you can feel the grief of this real life horror bleeding into the work, because of this, I hope that Thomas found writing this book as therapeutic, as I did reading it.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher, Inkshares, for an advanced electronic readers copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

Scott Thomas returns after his successful debut novel Kill Creek with his latest horror offering, Violet. While I enjoyed the nonstop, frenetic pace of Kill Creek, Violet is more of a slow burning novel driven by the central thoughts and actions of the protagonist, Kris Barlow. Recently widowed, she returns to the lake house of her youth (and scene of her mother's agonizing death from cancer) with her young daughter Sadie looking to spend a summer getting them both back to normal. Unknowingly, she stumbles back into her long forgotten past and an entity awaiting her return.

The first quarter/third of the book is fairly slow. Kris's character and motivations are unfurled leisurely, as are her relationships with her family, daughter, and deceased husband. Much time is spent establishing the lake house and townspeople of Pacington, with little in the way of conventional action taking place. However, as with any good horror novel, strange occurrences start to creep into the narrative, some overt and others incredibly subtle. Thomas saves the main horror for the final third of the book, where themes of memory, loss, and trauma come together in a surreal denouement that more than makes up for the slow start.

Thomas, as a veteran of TV movies and teleplays, writes in a manner that can be described as incredibly cinematic. Many of his passages can be clearly seen as set-pieces easily converted into a live action setting, with fantastic use of timely dialogue, blocking, and even music (his soundtrack in this one of the Smiths, Echo & the Bunnymen, the Cure, and Joy Division was particularly well chosen).

It's an interesting stylistic choice for Thomas to focus more on character in this novel than in his debut. There's a maturity in writing here: while Kill Creek was a fantastic book, the characters and dialogue tended at times to seem a bit unreal and beyond what people may do and say. Thomas has improved that here by focusing more on very real grief and allowing his characters space to react and adapt to the oftentimes senseless things that happen in an indifferent world.

I look forward to hearing "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" in the film adaptation.

**I was given a copy of this book by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks to Inkshares.**