Scream in the Dark by Manx does a fantastic job of channeling the tension and drama of modern horror movies into the written word. The cast of characters are all believable, the monster(s) horrifying, the plot incredible. The only complaint I have is that this is only part 1.

Daemon Manx's *The Ojanox I: Scream in the Dark* is an impressive start to what promises to be a fantastic horror series. Manx's ability to create rich, detailed characters and atmospheric settings reminded me of why I love Stephen King.

Set in Garrett Grove, 1979, the story brings the town and its residents to life in a way that feels both nostalgic and chilling. The Ojanox creatures are terrifying and vividly described, and the backstory of Garrett Grove is intriguing. I did find myself wanting more details about the Ojanox themselves, but that just adds to the anticipation for the next book.

Ten-year-old Troy Fischer, who is excited for Halloween and building his haunted attraction "Scream in the Dark," is a particularly engaging character. As a mysterious outbreak begins to affect the town's children, the tension and suspense build perfectly.

*The Ojanox I* is a great mix of classic creature horror, cosmic elements, and a coming-of-age story, though it’s definitely for an adult audience. Endorsed by Scream Queen Felissa Rose, this book marks Daemon Manx as a new name to watch in horror. I'm already looking forward to re-reading this one and can't wait for the next installment.

Four stars for a chilling and immersive read.

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It's 1979, a week before Halloween. Troy's Halloween party is taking place and it is awesome. After cupcakes, he leads his friends though <i>Scream in the Dark</i>, his haunted attraction that he conceived and built with his friend, Rob. Everything's perfect, except for Rob's absence. Unfortunately, Rob got sick during the week and had to skip the party. Or at least he was supposed to be resting at home when Troy finds him in the garage. But something is really wrong with Rob. He's barefoot and only wearing pj bottoms, despite the cold. Rob collapses and Troy's mother rushes him to the hospital. Then two more kids about the same age show up at the hospital with the same symptoms. What is happening to the children?

This was surprisingly good! I love a good coming-of-age horror story, and this one doesn't disappoint, except that this is only part 1 of 4. I want more, dammit! When's the next one being released?!

Unfortunately I did not finish this one. The writing isn't bad, but it just didn't connect with me at this time. I will probably give it another go later this year.

What is the Ojanox?
Something terrorises a small town in New York in 1979.
Gradually, the myth of the Ojanox gets more mysterious.
Nobody is immune, nobody is safe.
This is a face-paced read with amazing storytelling at its core.
It is moody and reminiscent of old horror books.
Concept: 5
Prose: 4
Characterisation: 3.5
Overall: 4/5

A Horror Bookworm Recommendation
The Ojanox Book 1: Scream In The Dark by Daemon Manx
https://horrorbookwormreviews.com/

It’s Fall of 1979, and Garrett Grove is gearing up for a Halloween celebration. However, when a dead body is discovered, a peculiar wound and lack of blood at the crime scene lead to a profound revelation. An evil presence seems to have descended on this little sleepy town where it’s about to get a whole lot worse.

The Ojanox: Book 1 Scream In The Dark by Daemon Manx sets the stage for the beginning of multiple storylines that mutates into one horrific tome. Violations by an unseen force and the fear it brings to the innocent is a whole new level of terror. Scream In The Dark is a creature feature that offers much more than an horrific monster, it’s a close encounter of the parasitic kind. You may never know the beast by its origin…for its name is Ojanox.

This is book one in a four part series of The Ojanox. Pain and anguish will be your tour guide as Manx delivers his fear factory with strange elements of the darkest kind. Its intoxicating atmosphere is a disturbing concept that guarantees the reader one heck of an unsettling good time. Book One, Scream In The Dark, garners a compelling enticement while leaving enough open ends to justify further books. I’m ready to dive into Book Two and see what lurks in the darkness and how this eerie series continues to grow.

Scream In the Dark achieves a real-life haunted house experience full of parasitic abnormalities. I say…let the feeding begin! A Horror Bookworm Recommendation.

Daemon brings you right back to the 80s/90s with his feel good Halloween season that ends up horrific. Ojanox really leaves you feeling like you were placed into a scary story from your childhood. Do you remember how you felt during spooky season as a kid? I do! This brought me right back there. And all I know is, I would not want to be anywhere near Garrett Grove this Halloween.

Nice creepy intro to The Ojanox series. The story is well paced and Manx does a great job introducing the characters while still incorporating action into the story. It’s a decent amount of characters and I struggled to keep up with names at times as most of the them are super common white American names. Most of the characters are fairly one dimensional, but some are given further backstory and likely will build personality but the next book.

I did feel as though the book ended a bit abruptly but I already have the next one ready to go so it’s not a huge deal.

Overall, this was an awesome start to the series and I look forward to getting further into this world.

When I think back to my childhood, Halloween stands out most of all. My dad introduced me to horror movies and books at age 7. “Night of the Living Dead” was my first movie and The Hound of Baskerville was my first book. I would re-read the book many times. I loved everything scary. If I did not scream during a movie or have night from a book then it was not very good to me. This author provided the opening for me to revisit those amazing memories of my dad. He passed away when I was 23, he was only 43, and his death left a huge hole in my heart and soul. I reminisced about all the good times I had with my dad, the fun I had trick or treating with friends and the times I was scared as a kid. The idea of something showing up in your community and not being able to figure out what it was, would be most terrifying. I know that this book will cause me some fearsome dreams when I sleep.

This definitely makes me want to come back to finish the rest of the series. The monster at the heart of this one is bonkers and scary as all get out. Great nostalgia vibes and a cast of interesting characters make this a fun horror show.

I really love it's vintage feel, especially since it takes place during Halloween. This adds to the creepy atmosphere. The Ojanox causes so many types of horror. What happens to the children really got to me. I definitely understood the parents' fears and anxiety. I really enjoyed all of the characters and each felt distinct. The cliff hanger was excellent. I can't wait for the next one!

Something emerges from a disturbed cave and terrorises a small town. No one is safe.

The backstory about the entity is great, the story is gruesome and fun and this will undoubtedly be a good series of books but I had one issue I couldn’t get past- the main characters are all men and boys. This would be ok but women exist in the book solely as accessories- mothers, girlfriends and nurses/ waitresses who are unnecessarily sexual in their behaviour with no other characteristics or role in the plot. It wasn’t just the setting that felt late 70s…

4 stars

A wonderful nostalgic horror. I loved the world building and characters. Creepy, and full of dread. This is really the way I love my horror to be served. I cant wait for the next book.

Daemon Manx's 'Scream In the Dark," the first part of his Ojanox tetralogy (pronounced "Oh-Zja-Nox," according to the book), is brimming with nostalgia for those amazing small-town horror books of the 1980s and the 1990s, some of which actually defined the whole contemporary horror scene and are still enjoyable today. Coupled with the cinematic atmosphere, several hair-raising moments, and the straightforward dialogue (most similar to a family TV series, to be fair), the book is an absolute delight: a complex though easy to follow, imaginative plotline, a large cast, characters you identify with almost immediately, a mysterious threat out of ancient legend - well, the honest, precise writing is just a bonus!

What impressed me most was the easy, somewhat cozy familiarity I felt while reading the book. This is in no way due to lack of originality - on the contrary, Manx has taken the best of small-town horror and crafted a unique, intriguing, hugely promising story that's downright harrowing and disturbing in places. Many times, however, I had the impression that I was watching a Flannagan show, that I was in a "safe place," so to speak, that I would not be disappointed, that I was in the presence of an author with amazing storytelling skills; Manx made everything seem so easy, so natural! The prose was flowing, and the characters acted like people I knew (or would like to!) The book is a definite page-turner, even though you yourself (along with the Sherriff, the coroner, the doctor, the parents and the kids in the book!) have very little understanding of what exactly it all adds up to. This is to be expected: being the first part of a four-volume series, the book explains little, much to the benefit of the story. I for one can't wait to see where the Ojanox series is going next. The first book ends in a sort of a cliffhanger, but, thankfully, Manx has included a link to an excerpt of the second volume.

I really hope everyone enjoys this winner! For readers who love a well-written horror story, this is a must-read!

The story is serviceable. Nice back story. Cookie-cutter characters. With a good editor and a rewrite this could be a great 80s retro horror gore fest. An extra star for effort.

I loved this! This is a great throwback to old-school Halloween horror. I can't wait to read the rest of the series!

Thank you NetGalley and Daemon Manx for kindly providing an ARC.

Such a fantastic debut to this series!

The year is 1979. The location: Garrett Grove, a small town in New York near the mountains. On the brink of Halloween, an ancient evil awakens and begins targeting the townsfolk.

I loved the Halloween vibes first and foremost. Really transports you back to your childhood. I also really dug the variety of horror on display: everything from cosmic to body horror. Some of these scenes will forever stay seared in my brain!!

Cannot wait to read the sequel!!

love books that are set in small towns, having grown in one during the 90s - which was not far from when the events of THE OJANOX 1: SCREAM IN THE DARK took place. Unsurprisingly, I have taken to this one immediately. I don't mind that there were quite a number of people to take note of - how they are related to one another (quite like a bird's eye view of the town) along with some of their backstories (a more personal view, like trailing them for a documentary) - as it is quite the norm in places like this. At some point, they just started to seem like old friends (Well, most of them.). I felt their anticipation for Halloween at the beginning of the book, and I felt their fear once an unknown horror started rolling in. The pace was good, and the open ending felt right to me. This is an exciting start to a 4-book series, and I am eager to read the next one!

Thank you to Daemon Manx and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book, I appreciate it very much! I highly recommend it to people who want to try reading horror for the first time.

I wish I could write a more positive review, but this did not hit for me. It had a lot of ideas and promise but didn’t realize them.

This is the first in a series of four books that are being released a month apart, and they were clearly written as a single story, as the author describes in the beginning. I knew that going in, so I wasn’t surprised, and yet still there is some disappointment. When you serialize a release there should be at least some self-contained element in the story, even if it is basically setting up for something larger. There is nothing like that here. This is clearly the first act that doesn’t even try to feel like a fully formed story, even one setting up for something else. It literally feels like a random page number or chapter count was reached and that is where the story was split apart. Again, I knew going in that this wasn’t a complete story, but I didn’t anticipate just how abrupt it would be. If you this going in, that the ending point feels arbitrary and that you really need to read all four in the series to have a single story, then I imagine it won’t be a problem.

Let me start with what I enjoyed, because this might be enough to bring some folks to the title(s). The author takes a very bird’s eye approach, moving all around this small town, which is a very nice way to develop the environment and pace the story. It reminded me of some vintage Stephen King in that way. We dropped in on more than a handful of different characters and would flit about, following each for a while before moving on, and seeing how this singular event in their town is spreading and affecting everyone. I also like that, even in this opening act of the story, there is no hesitancy to start the body count. Lots of stories will body a random person in the prologue and then thread you along until you’re about 2/3 of the way through before the bodies really start falling, or, less euphemistically, before the characters really start experiencing the effects of whatever antagonist they’re facing. That’s not the case here, and it is refreshing. It raises the stakes and that is compelling. Lastly, the ancient evil seems interesting enough. We don’t know enough about it, it could still fall into boring/unimaginative territory, but for now it seems to be a few different mythological ideas put together and it is exciting. (Really, the development in the later books will determine how fun this ancient evil really is as the story’s big bad).

So, what’s less than awesome? Firstly, and this might be the kind of fundamental difficulty, was that the writing itself felt somewhere between clunky and uninspired. We moved between so many characters that the style of prose felt like an author’s bio at the back of a book. It was kind of plain and didactic and felt like it was from a technical manual. There are a few occasions where it got more stylized, but this just felt out of place, in context, it felt like it was effortful, or trying too hard. I generally would rather err on the side of stripped back prose than purple prose, but here it didn’t inspire any real excitement or feeling. Added to that is what I felt were rather generic characters, and a lack of narrative focus. We met a lot of characters, and many of them were given random assortments of facts that served as their backstories, but ultimately they felt like the archetypical expectations of who would populate a small town. None of them felt particularly genuine or lived-in, but just there to meet the expectation of the role. This is where the writing style and the constant movement between characters didn’t do the story any favors. If the prose was more stylized then we might have felt more emotions in relation to these characters, we may have had more to grab onto when exploring their lives. But the dry delivery combined with almost biographic explanations meant I wasn’t drawn to any of them. And, seemingly, neither was the author, because it is hard to pinpoint who is the central, or central-adjacent, character. Even when the story really is about the whole town, and jumps around, we need at least one person that we can really identify with and experience the story along with. In this kind of story, it would usually be the local sheriff or the young child at the beginning of the conflict, and we do spend time with both of them, but not enough to distinguish them as more central than anyone else, really. I never felt like I was going on a journey with anyone, because the characters all felt flat and none of them stood out as audience surrogate (or as being anywhere adjacent to audience surrogate). Between what felt like flat writing, uninspired characters, and a somewhat absent narrative thrust, and add in maybe just a little racism (when this ancient evil is released it muses to itself that the humans in the world now are much more “intellectually evolved” than the ones who had locked it, presumably the Lenape indigenous peoples, who are frequently mentioned throughout the story) and I came really close to DNF’ing this story. The only thing that stopped me was it did move quickly, and given the pacing I was interested to see how this part of the story would end to set up for something more in book two (only to find out this part of the story doesn’t really end, as I mentioned already).

It is hard for me to recommend this. It is following a tried and tested trope; an ancient evil is accidentally released and wreaks havoc on a small town. There is a lot of gold to mine there, and Manx has definitely shown that he sees that gold, he knows it is there, I just didn’t feel like the story was particularly successful in taking the next step to mine any of it. It might be the case that reading the other parts redeem this one, but that would just go to show that it wasn’t wise to split the story into various publications in the way it was split. If you really like “small town in distress” vibes then you might have fun here, it just didn’t come together for me.

I want to thank the author, the publisher Last Waltz Publishing, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

The Ojanox is a horror like horror should be. It’s creepy and slowly crawls into your mind.
The whole host of characters are coming into full blown beings. The shadow I’m sure is going to be a full on nightmare.
This is just the first in the series! I’m on edge waiting for the others.