This was a NetGalley review copy of his new book, due out in October.
This time around the horror is on an isolated island off the coast of Ireland - the Isle of Croaghnakeela- henceforth referred to as IoC. I'm not typing that out more than once.
The eponymous Grace runs a rare book shop on the Irish mainland. When she receives a phone call from a Catholic priest (Father Richard) on the IoC to tell her that her birth mother has died and left her her house, she drops everything to travel over to find out about her past. She was adopted as an infant and has never known about her birth family.
Of course, the island has more than its fair share of secrets, some of them deadly, and these were the reason that her mother gave her up. When she returns to the island, it allows an old evil to rise up once more, breaking the stalemate that has existed on the island for the past 30 years.
As usual with Shine, this is incredibly atmospheric and has a number of twists and turns in the plot. I thought one of them was sprung from left field until I realised he'd been dropping hints the whole time and, actually, this was one of the best hidden in plain sight plot twists I've seen for a good long while.
The monster at the heart of the story is truly terrifying. It appears that Irish folklore has a lot of untapped horror potential, and AM Shine is an expert at mining those seams.
This is the least predictable of his books so far. Before the book is halfway through, just when I thought I knew what was coming, the narrative moved in a wholly unforeseeable direction and never looked back. The second half of this book barely lets up the tension. Some of the set pieces are among the scariest bits of writing I've seen outside of an Adam Nevill novel.
At a brief 221 pages, this packs in more atmosphere than a lot of books three times the length. The picture he paints of the island is so intense you can feel the fog creeping around you as you read it. The islanders are all well drawn characters and we understand their flaws and their actions.
With horror ranging from the deeply personal to almost cosmic, and a truly terrifying creature at the heart of it all, this is island horror at its best. (Is island horror a separate subgenre? If it isn't, it probably should be.)
An easy 8.5/10. I will definitely be buying a physical copy when it is released properly.
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