Born into a bloodline of strong and healthy males, fifteen-year-old August Foxx is the anomaly. A cripple by the very definition of the word, suffering from a rare neurological disease.
In the midst of navigating the choppy seas of his abnormal boyhood, August witnesses a disturbing confrontation between his parents that leaves him questioning his very existence. Getting no answers from his workaholic father nor alcoholic mother, he is dispatched overseas to the family’s Michigan estate while business is again put above building a strong family bond.
August, left in the care of the family’s long-time manservant, Reginald Ristil, feels more at ease than he does a sense of abandonment. That is until a mysterious stranger shows up at the residence under bizarre circumstances.
No family is without its secrets and wealth isn’t accumulated without sacrifice. The type of sacrifice that usually comes at the expense of someone else.
Dark bleatings everyone! This is the story of August, a boy “rich” in wealth and material possessions, but extremely lacking in the kind of familial bond he craves. Additionally, due to being wheelchair bound AND a teenager with no say over what he can and can’t do, he lacks freedom. It’s a particularly dark coming-of-age story that straddles the line between real-world madness and speculative debauchery.
I do have some criticisms, so let’s get those out of the way first.
The author clearly had this thing mapped out but the story itself does get a little convoluted as more and more elements and suspicions about what’s happening are thrown in. However, this is the author’s debut novel, so that’s pretty normal and forgivable. It includes visions/dreams, which – and if you read my reviews you’ll already know this – is just my biggest pet peeve in books. That’s not the author’s fault, and it’s a purely subjective complaint. There’s a plot-orientated point to them, but dreams and visions just grate on my nerves in general. Finally, August’s personal “manservant”, Reginald, is a black man. I hope it goes without saying that I prefer books with a diverse host of characters, but in this case I think I was just uncomfortable that Reginald’s purpose was to serve this rich kid. That could be a knee-jerk, over-sensitive reaction, I really don’t know. If there is a prejudice to this, I don’t think it was intentional on the author’s part, and there’s a good chance that I actually missed the point. I can’t go into it too much without spoiling the plot and the ending but one of the major themes of this book is hereditary privilege, so it’s entirely possible that the character dynamics were intentional in service of the point the book makes, and I just missed it.
With that out of the way, let’s move on to what I liked!
August has a lot going on, both in his outer world, and in himself. His life so far has been plagued by conflict, which made me feel sympathetic towards him, and in a lot of ways I found him quite relatable. I was interested in his journey, and since I’m a character first type of reader, this was super important to me and hooked me right in.
Next, the second two thirds of the book basically revolve around a home invasion, and there’s little scarier in the real world to me than a home invasion! Couple this with the fact that you just don’t quite know why it’s happening (until all is revealed, of course), and you’ve got yourself a tense little thriller of a horror there.
I’d recommend this to readers who enjoy a mix of speculative dark fantasy and grounded real-world horror. If you’d like to get your own copy, you can find it at the link below:
Happy Goat Horror 
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