Even though I'm finding (and loving) that the Books of Horror Go To List is astoundingly versatile, each horror novel on it being utterly unlike the next, this one plays out very traditionally. Durgin mentions Stephen King in his acknowledgements and that's telling, because this is very much the sort of novel, set in a small town in New England with fifteen-year-olds as its leads that he might have written back when he had an editor who wouldn't stand for a two hundred page story to run to six. Durgin keeps it lean and mean and is done in a fair two hundred and thirty.

Of course, the town has a secret. We're in Newport, New Hampshire, as close as anyone can get to Maine without being a Stephen King location, and the biggest thing to ever happen there was the Black Heart Killer, who killed a bunch of people in the woods outside of town before being caught in 1980. He tied them up, ripped them open and stole their hearts, a salacious enough MO to land the case a slot on the 'Unsolved Mysteries' TV show. It's pretty obvious that the killer was Henry Black because Durgin shows him burying his wife alive in the prologue, albeit to save himself and the town that's happy to pretend he never existed as it tries to forget.

Fast forward to 1999 and Howie Burke, a fifteen-year-old high school student, is shooting a horror movie in the woods outside of town with his friends, who fit the expected template. Howie is the likeable lead, who's all the more sympathetic given what he has to put up with from his asshole of a father. Cory Stevens is his best friend. Ryan Star is the one who always gets picked on because he weighs two hundred and fifty pounds and wears glasses. Todd Seymour is the class clown. They're stereotypical but well-drawn nonetheless and Durgin admirably spends plenty of time developing them, both individually and as an imperfect group.

You won't be shocked if I tell you that, during their shoot in the woods, they stumble on the grave of Henry Black's missing wife. He never revealed the location and the townsfolk have kept out of the woods as a matter of course ever since, so this is a big deal. What's an even bigger deal is that they disturb the grave and that allows what's waiting inside the opportunity to work on the kids, especially Todd, to let it out. And so we have a horror novel, with the dark secrets kept for twenty years by the townsfolk forced out into the open and the kids are the only ones who can save the day.

There's a lot to like here, especially given that this was a debut novel. Durgin has written further books, a couple of novels and a short story collection, and seems to be forging a reputation in the genre. The nostalgia element is palpable and effective, especially given that small town America in the eighties and nineties has been done to death in horror. We don't need another example to add to the list, but Durgin does this well enough that we realise that we don't mind at all.

Perhaps the main reason why I liked it is because, however straightforward the story seems on the surface, there are a couple of powerful twists and an underlying theme of abuse of power. Howie's dad, abusing his power as a parent, is only the first example and Matt Kelly, who abuses physical power as the school bully is  only the most obvious. Abuse of power is also evident in the school principal, the local police and other authority figures, thus making the sole exception to the rule stand out all the more from the crowd.

That he's killed off shockingly early, given how overtly he ties to the back story, is a cunning choice by Durgin. It seems like it's a terrible mistake, because he's so obviously connected to the problem and so obviously going to be part of the solution, and, in most horror novels, it would be a terrible mistake, but here I believe it's the single best decision Durgin made anywhere in this book. Killing this character off marks the removal of the last chance at outside help the kids have, the last way they can leave this mess in the hands of the grown-ups who created it and really should fix it.

And that's the underlying point. Sure, kids should always be able to trust in the adults with power and authority over them to do the right thing. However, that's sadly not always viable and that's never more obvious than to the child of an abusive father. In Newport, there's only one adult that these kids can trust in and he's quickly taken away from them. The loss of that character feels like the loss of hope, but it's really a way to force these kids to step up and do what needs to be done. Coming of age is fundamentally about the acceptance of responsibility and, while we ought to be able to do that safely and gradually, sometimes that isn't an option. So to me, Durgin's decision to kill off that one character not only isn't a terrible mistake, it's what makes this book work.

On the flipside, there are elements that aren't as easy to like and they're often far more obvious than the bizarre fashion in which quotes are smart but apostrophes aren't. The prose tends to be very matter of fact, sometimes effective but often flat, enough that I could imagine the narrator of an audiobook version delivering calmer sections in a monotone. Hey, it's a debut novel, so that isn't difficult to forgive. I'll happily pick up further Durgin books and watch him develop his voice as an author. Harder to forgive is how archetypal so many of these characters are. We've all read or seen them before, to the degree that I could easily put the faces of certain actors onto certain characters.

And that leads into the aspect that could be taken as either a positive or negative, depending on our personal tastes. While it's completely obvious that Stephen King was a massive influence for Durgin, this plays out so cinematically that we could imagine that he saw Stephen King stories on film more often than he read them in print. It would be trivial to adapt this into a movie, so trivial that very little of the story would need to be changed to fit a ninety-minute running time and the majority of the scenes would remain largely intact, from the meta red herrings in the early scene with the kids finding a grave while shooting a film to the finalé in a quintessentially Hitchcockian location. I think I'd lean towards this being positive, because it ties into the nostalgia, but I could see some readers wondering why this was a novel instead of a movie script.

All in all, this is a worthy entry in the Books of Horror Go To List, a great example of how new and independent authors can traipse into the genre and make an impact with their very first book. It isn't surprising that he's working on a sequel, 'Consumed by Evil', which I'll happily devour when it sees release. However, it's also surely the most traditional horror novel on that list from the first eighteen I've read, only Ania Ahlborn's 'The Shuddering' even in contention for that title. It isn't going to bring any surprises to long-term horror fans. ~~ Hal C F Astell