Sean Thomas Fisher

This book started off good, but somewhere along the line it kind of just dropped off as I never did feel the creepiness that a normal haunted house story usually has within its pages. It had more of a twilight zone atmosphere which normally I don't mind, but not when I am going into a book thinking it is going to be a scary romp through a haunted house. Also the story jumps from the past to the present every other chapter and if you are not paying attention you could get lost about what time frame you are in.

The story is about some young friends that decide to go exploring in a haunted house that is in their neighborhood and the strange things that they encounter within its walls. I never really felt attached to the characters and maybe I was expecting too much from the book. It might be considered scarier for a younger generation, but for a seasoned horror fan, this book needs to be left on the shelf. Two stars for this one.
… (mais)

Zombies and they are coming from that water. Will Rory, Hooper, Rachel, woody and all the other manage to survive the days to come that are straight from a nightmare or will they end up as one of the walking dead too??

This book was quite interesting to say the least. I had personally never heard of zombies coming from the water before so this was a unique and first time thing for me. I still believe that there was more to be explained on how those zombies came to be though. It seemed just loosely described and not given much care.

The book certainly played like a horror movie to me. The describing of the characters and the details of what exactly was going down worked well for painting a vivid picture in my mind that I could clearly see playing out.

All that being said some of the deaths of characters seemed rushed and totally out of place. It seemed like they just wanted to get rid of the character and just suddenly killing them off was the best choice?? (Yes this was a hit at Doc's death). And then Grundy mourning of his private that just got pulled into the water played out so much like a poorly acted scene in a B movie. For some reason I don't feel like that would have been something that he would have done and it just left me kind of annoyed.

Lastly, the ending was something else in of its self. I knew that something had to be going down with the book seemingly wrapping up and yet having so much time left in it. I suppose it certainly isn't one of those good feeling endings I could have accepted it except for some certain things. Once again it seemed like the zombies were just brought back because it was relevant to the plot. I fail to understand how a mosquito could do such a thing. Then I wonder how the military didn't think of such a thing and get those people out of that area and figure crap out before letting people live there. I guess that really leaves the book open for sequel with one of the other main characters but all of it seems a bit far fetched to me.

Overall, this was a decent book. I did love how vivid it was and how it played out like a movie but some of the things were just to far fetched for me to really enjoy and get into the book and some things just to sudden and annoying. It seems almost like any other zombie book except for the water thing.… (mais)

SCARY HOUSE featured genuinely scary scenes that I enjoyed!

There's nothing like a good haunted house tale to get my heart pumping. Combine that with a coming of age story and I should have a real winner on my hands. In this case, I did enjoy the story, it's just that I never felt quite connected to the characters.

Gavin and his friends are getting ready for Halloween and want to check out a somewhat nearby haunted house. Gavin has his new Polaroid, (this is the early 90's), and used it to take instant photos around the home. The house has a history, so when they find an old photo album still there, they flip through to find out more. It's when they come across a picture of their bikes, parked outside that they start to get the creeps. From there, as you may have guessed, things go downhill. What happens then? You'll have to read SCARY HOUSE to find out!

There's a lot of early 90's nostalgia, a Jurassic Park watch is repeatedly mentioned as are some other heavy metal and rock bands, such as Nirvana. (Which is funny to me, because the author used to be a DJ at my local rock radio station and it played a lot of music from that era.)

This book was fun and did have a cool premise. Unfortunately, I couldn't help feeling it was somewhat derivative of King's IT. (It must be hard to avoid that comparison, when it's a nostalgic coming of age story which also involves a group of kids coming back to town as adults.) The other issue I had was that I didn't care that much for the characters. That fact took a lot of tension out of the final scenes.

Overall, I did have fun with this story and would try more from Sean Thomas Fisher in the future, it's just that SCARY HOUSE didn't turn out to be ALL THAT scary for me. Your mileage may vary!

*I received a free Kindle copy of this book from the author in exchange for my honest review. This is it.*… (mais)

My original Floodwater audiobook review and many others can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.

I wasn’t inspired by this audiobook. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t enjoy it either.

The story concept was unoriginal and had some fairly gaping plot holes, but it could have been elevated into something much better if it had been paired up with the right narrator for the job. Unfortunately, I don’t think J. Scott Bennett was the right narrator – he didn’t incorporate any emotion into the characters or add to the suspense, the audio itself was slow and wasn’t able to hold my attention or interest.
The production quality was good and I wondered if it was just me being fussy that was getting in the way of my enjoying this book but the more I think about it, the more I think that it really was the lack of any emotion and intonation that made it hard to latch on to.

Rory is back in his hometown and goes on a lakeside camping trip with his old high school buddies, and you know what that means in any zombie novel! After most of his friends have been devoured, he joins up with a ragtag bunch of survivors and tries to get out of the danger zone before it’s too late.

I never did pick up on the finer points of the whys and wherefores of this zombie outbreak, but the local undertaker has been dumping bodies in the lake which was contaminated with toxic waste a decade ago.
This can obviously mean only one thing… Waterborne zombies.
This idea was actually pretty novel and could have been fascinating, but the story focused more on the survivors rather than the cause of the outbreak.

The story plods on predictably once the zombies have taken their first lumbering steps above the water, though this could be more of a statement on how many zombie novels and films I’ve devoured.

This is one of those rare moments when I highly recommend reading the print edition of this book rather than listening to the audio, I found my attention wandering throughout the story and think that I would have got on much better by reading the book myself.

Audiobook was purchased for review by ABR.… (mais)