Craving an adventure to wake them from their lethargic Mexican holiday before they return home, four friends set off in search of one of their own who has travelled to the interior to investigate an archaeological dig in the Mayan ruins.
After a long journey into the jungle, the group come across a partly camouflaged trail and a captivating hillside covered with red flowers. Lured by these, the group move closer until they happen across a gun-toting Mayan horseman who orders them away. In the midst of the confrontation, one of the group steps inadvertently backwards into the flowering vine. And at that moment their world changes forever…
Dark bleatings, tribe! You know, it took me so long to get around to reading this book. I think it was sitting on my shelf for like… 8 years, just staring at me gloomily as I picked up newer books to read instead of it. It was probably cursing me every time I walked off with some other book in hand. But I finally got around to it when I was on holiday, and oh my gosh, what a book!
In some ways, this works as you’d expect a standard horror story to work. A group of young people go adventuring, something hideous awaits, and before they know it, they’re trapped. Soon, they start getting picked off. Who will go next? Will anyone come to save them? Will even a single one of them survive? You know, that kind of horror. It doesn’t do anything particularly spectacular with the storytelling format, but that really didn’t matter to me because of the many areas that the book did excel in.
Firstly, the characters were about as real as they can be without actually leaping out of the pages at you (screaming for help). I didn’t like all of them, but I understood where all of their minds went. This made me extremely nervous, because though some of their thoughts and plans started turning pretty dark, I couldn’t really blame them. I was a helpless bystander watching as these poor people started losing their minds and making questionable decisions.
And let’s talk about a particular questionable decision (without spoilers, don’t worry). Something absolutely horrific goes down early on and then naturally, how to deal with it eventually is brought up. And you guys, I do not know what the eff the right answer to this dilemma was, because each option absolutely sucked for different reasons. I think the author did a great job with these sorts of choices because as a reader, I just didn’t know what I’d do for the best.
The most outstanding element of this story for me was the villain. It’s not the people who are giving them grief, but something from nature. Or is it? And if it is, what kind of nature? Is it animal or mineral? Where did it come from, what does it want, why is it like this? Goddamnit, that bloody thing had me stressed. STRESSED I TELL YOU! The group are well and truly at the mercy of one of the most out-of-the-box antagonists I’ve read in a long time (yes, I realise this story came out quite some time back now).
I thoroughly enjoyed each page of this horrendous but captivating adventure of terror and blood. I’d recommend it to horror fans with a particular interest in location-themed horror and stories about being trapped. If you’d like to get a copy, I’ve popped a link down below for you:
Happy Goat Horror 
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