Happy Goat Horror

A cemetery filled with innocents. A ghostly chill in the air. Will a short walk through the woods awaken a dark power?

Kylie Macklin is eager to live a normal life. Freshly moved from Florida to Alabama and finally in remission from cancer, the optimistic nine-year-old is used to dodging her overprotective mom’s warnings. So when a new playmate invites her to hang out, the happy girl thinks nothing of the playground being located in a graveyard for young victims of the Spanish Flu… and a local serial killer.

Kayla Macklin hates starting over. Forced to relocate after her little sister’s recovery, the sullen nineteen-year-old despises her new home more when she sees a terrifying vision in the nearby crypt. And as kids around town start to fall gravely ill, she begins to suspect there is something sinister at play.

Tormented by a frightening specter’s ever-closer appearances, Kylie turns to her older sibling for help. But as Kayla digs into the history of the haunted ground, the twisted truths she discovers hint at a bloodthirst that can never be sated.

Can they face down the malevolent force without tripping into their own graves?

The Dead Children’s Playground is the bone-chilling first book in the American Horrors series. If you like dark twists, scary puzzles, and poignant moments, then you’ll love James Kaine’s supernatural spine-tingler.

Buy The Dead Children’s Playground to start a fatal game today!

Dark bleatings, my playful tribe! I’m here today with a book that totally surprised me, I have to say. This is the story of Kayla and her younger sister, Kylie. They’re dealing with family strife, the effects of Kylie’s previous life-threatening illness, Kayla’s social life, oh…and the small matter of a terrible supernatural force that targets and terrorises children.

It opens with a prologue set in the past, in which a mute cemetery worker is hunted down and strung up by the locals for being a heinous child killer. The thing is, it’s fairly obvious to us that this gentle giant didn’t do it. He was giving serious John Coffey mixed with Lennie (Of Mice and Men) vibes. Then we jump forward in time to the present, where our characters are moving to a new town and little Kylie makes a friend, who is quite obviously a ghost. Or is she?

I’ll admit, I thought I had this entire plot figured out and nailed within the first twenty pages. Two girls move to a new town where the ghosts of children seem to be terrorised by the killer, but then we’ll find out later that the “killer” is actually taking care of them, and the real murderer from the past will be revealed and dealt with, ending Kayla and Kylie’s Scooby Doo caper. Oh, how very short-sighted and presumptuous I was. That’s not it at all.

Yes, the killer isn’t the real killer (that’s not a spoiler, we’re meant to infer that from the opening), but the real killer could not possibly be predicted, despite it being very well set up. What I thought was going to be a “just fine” story about two sisters befriending ghosts and thwarting evil turned out to be an empathetic look at a family with complex issues, embedded in religious horror, themes around the nature of death, and even – holy crap – Greek mythology. This infusion sounds like too many things but it was all woven together so seamlessly that it had me questioning where the lines blur between the world’s different belief systems. Why are there even lines in the first place?

Children in peril, characters we care about, different viewpoints, supernatural shenanigans, the bonds of new friendships contrasting with a fractured family, and a large, scary ghost capable of actually hurting the living as well as the dead…(deep breath)…many threads that seemingly won’t link but then tie into a lovely, satisfying bow, an array of different horror elements that borrow from various subgenres, a compelling central narrative, and some very decent queer representation that I think will be particularly beneficial to YA readers. What’s not to love?

I’d recommend this to fans of ghost stories, though this turns quite unconventional in that regard, and also to general horror fans. If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:

THE DEAD CHILDREN’S PLAYGROUND

JAMES KAINE

Bleeeeeat!