I'm new to both these authors, but they've each turned out a lot of books in a relatively short time and that doesn't always bode well. However, based on this one alone, it seems like the words flow effortlessly out of them and that endows this with a strong sense of urgency. 'The Haunted Forest Tour' kicks in hard and fast and just keeps on going. I read for what felt like half an hour and I was a hundred and thirty pages in. Sure, the font size is larger than usual in my copy but that's hardly a trivial page count that whips by in a flash.

The prologue only runs ten pages but it contains the deaths of everyone in a small town—Cromay, New Mexico—in a fantastic manner. It starts slowly, with a ten-foot-tall pine tree appearing out of nowhere in Mike Fradella's yard, but there's another on page four and another six pages on, they've erupted out of the ground so quickly that they spear people to haul up into the sky and in such numbers that the town isn't there any more, just a bizarrely circular forest. The entire act of destruction took about an hour and almost three hundred people are dead.

As the title suggests, it's also a haunted forest, densely populated with a highly imaginative batch of monsters, not only the routine ones flaunted in the back cover blurb. There's also a tour, run by a company called H. F. Enterprises, that takes those with enough money into the forest via a tram system. Each tram contains forty highly-paying passengers, along with a driver and a guide. It's all perfectly safe, because the trams are massively armoured and there's never been a casualty. And, if you don't see that as a setup as they launch a special Hallowe'en tour that's going to go deeper into the forest than ever before, then you haven't read enough horror novels.

Of course, it all goes horribly wrong very quickly. Moore and Strand introduce us to a rather large ensemble cast of characters and then whittle it down very quickly. The first tram into the forest on this extra special tour breaks down, just like that, relatively quickly too. It has no power, so no way forward and no way back. The powerful electromagnet underneath won't work either, so the tram is reliant only on its robust construction and, as we soon find out, there are monsters in this forest large enough to really not care about how robust it is. They're going to rip it open anyway.

And so we're quickly introduced to a lot of different monsters who kill a lot of different customers who are pretty close to sitting ducks. A limited armoury is all they have between life and death, dished out in a set of ways that's going to look darkly hilarious on their death certificates. Some of these chapters are over in what seems like minutes of in story time because Moore and Strand really aren't hanging around with this one. And, once the next tram arrives and promptly crashes into them, causing even more chaos, they start to focus in on the main thrust of survivors.

Thus far, it's been breakneck action in a form that any haunter can only dream of, the death of the vast majority of paying customers aside. My eldest son bought me this one for my birthday and it's a perfect choice for him because Hallowe'en is his Christmas and he's run a community haunt for a long time. I'm going to need to buy him a copy now, because I'm not giving mine up but he needs to read this. It's so far up his alley that it should have been dedicated to him, if only the authors had any idea who he was.

What it hasn't included is an explanation of why, but that does arrive early into the second half in truly bizarre fashion. I'm not going to touch on it, because that's overt spoiler territory, but it is a changing point for the book. Much of the joy early on comes through nobody—not us and not the characters in the book—having the faintest idea why the haunted forest exists. It's just there and, in America, that means that it's ripe for financial exploitation. Sure, H. F. Enterprises employs an array of cryptozoologists who have spent the past few years classifying monsters, even naming an array of new ones, but their primary take on something so unprecedented is to monetize it.

When the explanation arrives, arguably at about the right time, the book changes. Now, it's not merely an outrageous flight of horror fantasy; it becomes grounded with character motivations and story arcs that we can attempt to predict. In other words, it inherently becomes something a lot deeper but without as much mystery and that's emphatically a double edged sword. Two ways in which the authors survive that shift is through expanding the locations and focusing in on the dwindling cast of characters. In other words, there are survivors from the tram trapped inside the forest and also people outside who work for H. F. Enterprises and are trying to deal with this.

One key thing to note is that the characters are relatively broadly drawn so that any or all of them can be killed off at a moment's notice, but with enough definition that we can delineate between them and maybe even care a little. There are a few vaguely sympathetic characters, like Lee, who works as a professional skeptic and debunker, or Mindy, who's only there to give her adult son the Hallowe'en present of his dreams. However, none are so sympathetic that every reader is going to care about them. We're going to pick and choose our favourites. Few are obnoxious enough to set everyone against them either, even Eddie the professionally insensitive driver of the first tram, who's oddly endearing even if he would drive us nuts in person.

In other words, we do want some of these folk to survive but we're far from unhappy when a lot of them don't and that's never a bad thing for a fast-paced pulp horror novel. There are other things that help elevate this book. One is that the first half of the book sets all sorts of rules. We have no idea why they're set this way but they are and everyone in the story has acknowledged them. And then those rules apparently change and all bets are off. That's a nice touch. Another is a capable revelation that we aren't ever going to see coming but which works very well when it arrives.

Finally, there's a real sense of humour in play here, a very dark one of course, but one that shapes the book without ever turning it into an outright comedy. I found myself grinning early and often and eventually started to write down some of my favourite lines. "The thing had no shoulders, not in the traditional sense, but it shrugged them anyway." "Brad tried to smile, but the wiggling pink cilia that had replaced his teeth took a lot of the charm out of it." I started to envisage how some would be delivered in a movie adaptation, like this peach of a line of dialogue: "Gonna be hard to put a positive spin on that for the media, especially since they killed some members of the media."

All in all, this is a grand introduction to the work of both James A. Moore and Jeff Strand, both of whom have long bibliographies of horror novels to track down and devour. If they're all paced with this sort of urgency, it wouldn't take long to rip through them all. However, I have to mention that I chose this one from a dozen Books of Horror Go To List titles waiting for me to review because we lost Moore in March. I never interacted with him but a lot of friends, not only in the literary world, apparently knew him and every one of them thought very highly of him. He was only fifty-eight. If you're paying attention, you have a new fan. ~~ Hal C F Astell