The story centres around a new estate and two couples who have moved into it. Jason and Emily Danes and Maurice and Claudette Penze- Weedell. Jason is a painter, finding his feet in the art world; his wife has her own catering business. Opposite them is Maurice and Claudette, older than their neighbours, who, well Claudette anyway, have pretensions of wanting to go up in the world. Both couples gradually begin to experience some very peculiar happenings, ghostly apparitions, and a general sense that something is certainly not happy with their arrival. Not helped by the locals, who forewarn that ‘nobody ever leaves Cold Hill’.
The novel promised a lot, I read the blub on the back and was looking forward to a creepy read. But unfortunately, was disappointed. I found the characters of Jason and Emily wooden and unexplored. There was an interesting bit of back story with Jason, a certain issue with OCD that could have given some meat to the character and the way he reacts to the situation around him. Emily was just as one dimensional, really, I didn’t learn much about her at all. It was the same with Maurice and Claudette, both almost comical figures but again that’s all they remained.
Perhaps in the hands of, say Stephen King (cliched choice, but I couldn’t help but think what he would do with it) this idea would have been an unnerving read, giving the reader a foreboding sense that something wasn’t quite right with this otherwise ‘perfect’ modern estate. There is back story of Cold Hill that was intriguing and again wasn’t really explored until the latter part of the book. Yet I wasn’t quite put off not to read to the end, finding that in the last few chapters of the novel, the story really seemed to flow and the author appeared to find his voice in this genre.
Overall, it wasn’t bad, the story itself is intriguing and the idea of a cursed place, though a familiar theme in horror fiction, is one that always has scope. But this novel failed to deliver on the character front and felt as if an author had been given the challenge of writing a horror novel, though had got the theme didn’t give much consideration to his characters. I always feel, that with any fictional writing, you must care about the protagonists, if not, their personal journey doesn’t bother you at all. And horror needs a certain anxiety or unease from the reader for them to invest in the story.