In rural Ireland, Mina's car breaks down next to a strange forest. There are no animal or bird sounds, except as night falls when she hears an ungodly bestial screaming. In the morning, she knows she needs to go for help and she walks into the woods...
There she finds a small group of people sheltering in a small building against the creatures that come out at night. The Watchers won't let anyone leave the forest alive.
This is unrelenting tension from the first chapter onwards. We're thrown straight into the danger and Shine barely lets the reader relax for even a single page.
There's even room for some major plot twists along the way. I admit I did work out the biggest twist about 100 pages before the reveal, but that doesn't spoil the book in the slightest. It was hinted at subtly enough and remained ambiguous enough until the reveal that I wasn't sure I'd picked up the foreshadowing and the hints correctly. and there was a huge sense of achievement when my suspicions were confirmed.
If there is any flaw with this book, it's the final couple of pages. The climax of the book did inspire an eye roll rather than shock as it's a bit of a cliched way to end a story, but, this is a debut novel and the rest of the book is so good, I'm not that bothered.
The characters are all well drawn. Their behaviour seems entirely plausible in this horrific situation they're all trapped in. The tension is sustained perfectly and kept my nerves on edge the whole time I was reading it. I've not read anything with this level of sustained suspense since the Ritual by Adam Nevill. There are emotionally charged sequences that really hit the mark with pinpoint accuracy.
If not for the last two pages, I would have said this was better than The Creeper. Regardless, whatever his next book is, it's going to the top of my TBR.
AM Shine is one hell of a scary writer.
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