When Scott Dwyer calls his old friends back to their old home town after the death of one of their friend group, it awakens old memories and an old evil in the woods.
As teenagers they went camping in Suicide Woods as a Halloween dare and it turned out more terrifying than they could have imagined. The evil following them long into their adult lives.
So far, so Stephen King.
But this book quickly turns into something very different. Any comparison with King finishes after the basic setup.
The first act build the characters skillfully and hints heavily at what happened in the night of the title.
Act 2 takes us back to that night through a detailed flashbacks.
Act 3 gives us the horrible and violent aftermath, along with the explanations to all the mysteries of their shared past. But who will be alive to learn the truth?
This is very well written, atmospheric and occasionally bloody scary take on the old "return to the scene of childhood peril" theme.
The childhood trauma was indeed traumatic. There are some great set pieces and a couple of imaginatively creepy monsters. The violence, when it happens, is brutal and effective. The haunted woods genre has not been this effective since Adam Nevill's The Ritual.
Kristopher Triana was another brand new name for me, but I am definitely going to check out more of his books soon.
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