Author: Kelley Armstrong
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Series: Stand Alone
Genre: Horror
Rating: 2 Stars
Medium: Audio Book

The blurb from Amazon: 
Laney Kilpatrick has been renting her vacation home to strangers. The invasion of privacy gives her panic attacks, but it’s the only way she can keep her beloved Hemlock Island, the only thing she owns after a pandemic-fueled divorce. But broken belongings and campfires that nearly burn down the house have escalated to bloody bones, hex circles, and now, terrified renters who’ve fled after finding blood and nail marks all over the guest room closet, as though someone tried to claw their way out…and failed.

When Laney shows up to investigate with her teenaged niece in tow, she discovers that her ex, Kit, has also been informed and is there with Jayla, his sister and her former best friend. Then Sadie, another old high school friend, charters over with her brother, who’s now a cop.

There are tensions and secrets, whispers in the woods, and before long, the discovery of a hand poking up from the earth. Then the body that goes with it… But by that time, someone has taken off with their one and only means off the island, and they’re trapped with someone—or something—that doesn’t want them leaving the island alive.

I went into this book really looking forward to it. It’s spooky season. Kelley Armstrong is one of my favorite authors – I hands down love her Women of the Otherworld series. Though, if you caught the star rating above, you’ll already know that unfortunately I didn’t really love it.

Also just a warning there may be some spoilers in the review so if you haven’t read it and want to make your own opinion before reading mine, I suggest reading it and coming back to read my review.

The book started off well. We’re introduced to Hemlock Island by Laney getting a phone call from her current renters because there’s blood in a closet. Naturally, they aren’t interested in staying and want a refund for the shock. And after that call, Laney decides to head out to the island to check it out, and her ward and niece Madison in tow. As she gets to the island, we’re introduced to her ex-husband, Kit, who had actually been the one to gift her Hemlock Island and the house on it as a wedding present and his sister Jayla. After arriving on the island by boat, an old high school friend and her brother also show up. So we have a motley crew of six people that are checking out what’s going on in the house.

As the book develops we find out slowly the history between Kit and Laney, as well as Jayla and Sadie. As friendships go, their story is a spiderweb knotted history and the past only puts tension between all of them. Which, in the beginning, does help to amp up some of the tension for the novel too because they’re not sure what’s going on and things start to not add up.

It culminates in them finding a severed arm sticking out of the ground at the house and some back and forth on if it’s a real arm or a Halloween prop prank because people have been trying to push Laney into selling Hemlock Island.

The book as a whole at this point is giving slasher thriller vibes to the horror genre it was placed in, and as a whole I was here for it. Especially when they go to try and get off the island only to find that the boat is missing, but so is one of the six so the logical conclusion is they took off in the night with the boat and left them stranded. And a check to the personal shed where there should be some kayaks only leads to everything but a paddle board being destroyed. This leaves the remaining five trapped on the island with no way off and no communication to the outside world because there’s no service on Hemlock Island.

About half way through the book, give or take, the story veers into some really strange choices. Now that we’re halfway into the book, we start to get hints of strange paranormal happenings – like body parts that aren’t connected to the rest of the body still twitching and moving kind of hints. With body parts being used in strange ways, I was still kind of riding this, okay maybe it’s a weird Satanic cult kind of thing going on because some of the symbols were pulled out of Satanic books and off websites and things. Because it also means that in some ways, we’re still in that slasher, trapped on the island with the killer kind of vibe. After all, the killer could have used the current dead to raise something or feed the land kind of sacrifice need. So strange but still kind of riding that wave.

Then while trapped in the house, because of what they’d found with the body parts, the story careens sideways with this romance bubble where Laney and Kit have this heart to heart – because apparently now is the time to really work out what went wrong in their marriage, and also oh surprise there’s a secret kid in the mix to further complicate everything between everyone that had come to the island. The whole side-step of the narrative really felt off and out of place because as a whole, it didn’t have anything to do with the plot. The secret kid/how she was conceived felt purely there to be the full and soul reason for the rift between some of the group and fell a little flat as a whole. Though it could also be because all it did was add to the sideways pull from the horror genre we were supposed to be in.

To fully push us off the story cliff, or in tv land as we say, to jump the shark, surprise the big bad is the island spirit thing itself that’s been killing and fucking with them because apparently Laney broke a promise to it. Once she hadn’t even realized she’d made when Kit had brought her to the island and they decided to buy it and build the house on it. What really disappointed me was for someone who wrote a full paranormal series, the paranormal in this horror book fell so flat. There was gore for the sake of gore instead of a horror scare. The paranormal limitations of this creature/spirit/thing didn’t add up or make sense. And because it all came out of no where, for me at least because like I said before, I was totally down the slasher-trapped on the island with the killer – maybe it’s a paranormal cult killing. So to have it be some island spirit of the land thing was kind of weird.

Like I said above too, the limitations of the powers of this thing didn’t make sense, or well technically the lack there of. It’s creating a cloud of birds thick enough that the characters can’t see through – which means it likely would have had to pull them from the mainland realistically? It’s killing with the foliage – and making the vines sharp enough to actually sever limbs. It’s taking over the dead bodies to speak through them and make them move, but can also appear as the dead person as if they were whole and fine. Also it can take over NOT dead people? Like, this thing basically has the powers of a god, but also couldn’t stop someone from being killed because they were sleeping. When you really look at all the things this creature thing has done, the rules under which its being written and explained don’t make a whole lot of sense, almost like Kelley wasn’t able to actually give her full attention to ensuring that there were world rules on its powers and what they would be. It feels more like, let’s throw the kitchen sink at it when it comes to powers and what it can do, who cares if they all make sense together. Which again, since I love one of her paranormal series where she writes the vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural with a clear boundary of their powers and limitations, was severely disappointing to me.

All in all, I guess if you don’t mind not looking too hard at the whys, and don’t mind a little genre whiplash, take a try of this book. Though I would recommend waiting until you can get it on sale.