Lezersrecensie
Horror falling flat
https://looneybooks79.blog/2024/12/29/graveyard-shift/
Five insomniacs have a habit of meeting each other at a cemetery, the only place where they’re allowed to smoke. One is a journalist, one’s a hotel receptionist, there’s a barman, a rideshare driver and then there’s the self-claimed gardian of the derelict church that looms over the graveyard and these five people.
This night, when they come together, there’s something different… they discover a hole where there shouldn’t be one. There hasn’t been a burial in over a hundred years and an excavation for research seems very unlikely as the university needs fresh cadavers for that. There’s a real conundrum here.
When they start investigating the hole, keeping an eye out on who comes and closes the newly dug hole for instance, there’s seems to be a link between the weird hole and some cases of violent outbursts by people: one of them even the bartender’s bar.
There’s also a link between a certain fungus, where the self-claimed protector of the old church knows more about. The journalist smells a headline here and enlists the group, the Anchorites!
So in 2024 I finally read ‘If we were villains’ in a Dutch translation. I loved that book so much, so well constructed, it was sheer perfection with so many Shakespeare references. So my hopes were very high for this novella, and based on that amazing cover artwork I expected a creepy dark horror story.
M.L. Rio’s writing is stylishly great and as an insomniac herself she knows what she’s writing about. It took her almost a decade to write another story, after her debut novel ‘If we were Villains’.
This novella does start out to be a creepy dark horror story, approaching the gothic level of stories like those written by Susan Hill (The Woman in Black, The Small Hand, The Man in the Picture) but somehow, halfway the novella, the horror elements fall completely flat and it turns into something completely different (part detective story, part crime noir) and it looses its momentum entirely, which is truly unfortunate because this could have been the perfect Halloween novella but due to the change in tone it lost the titel of horror story.
I repeat, no remarks on the writing style of M.L. Rio, none at all! She can write a good atmospheric novel (she proved that already) but it’s best to choose a genre and not switch halfway the story. So for me this book is far from perfect but it shows promise to what may come next by the author. Let’s hope she will write a good horror novel one day!
Five insomniacs have a habit of meeting each other at a cemetery, the only place where they’re allowed to smoke. One is a journalist, one’s a hotel receptionist, there’s a barman, a rideshare driver and then there’s the self-claimed gardian of the derelict church that looms over the graveyard and these five people.
This night, when they come together, there’s something different… they discover a hole where there shouldn’t be one. There hasn’t been a burial in over a hundred years and an excavation for research seems very unlikely as the university needs fresh cadavers for that. There’s a real conundrum here.
When they start investigating the hole, keeping an eye out on who comes and closes the newly dug hole for instance, there’s seems to be a link between the weird hole and some cases of violent outbursts by people: one of them even the bartender’s bar.
There’s also a link between a certain fungus, where the self-claimed protector of the old church knows more about. The journalist smells a headline here and enlists the group, the Anchorites!
So in 2024 I finally read ‘If we were villains’ in a Dutch translation. I loved that book so much, so well constructed, it was sheer perfection with so many Shakespeare references. So my hopes were very high for this novella, and based on that amazing cover artwork I expected a creepy dark horror story.
M.L. Rio’s writing is stylishly great and as an insomniac herself she knows what she’s writing about. It took her almost a decade to write another story, after her debut novel ‘If we were Villains’.
This novella does start out to be a creepy dark horror story, approaching the gothic level of stories like those written by Susan Hill (The Woman in Black, The Small Hand, The Man in the Picture) but somehow, halfway the novella, the horror elements fall completely flat and it turns into something completely different (part detective story, part crime noir) and it looses its momentum entirely, which is truly unfortunate because this could have been the perfect Halloween novella but due to the change in tone it lost the titel of horror story.
I repeat, no remarks on the writing style of M.L. Rio, none at all! She can write a good atmospheric novel (she proved that already) but it’s best to choose a genre and not switch halfway the story. So for me this book is far from perfect but it shows promise to what may come next by the author. Let’s hope she will write a good horror novel one day!
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