Sarah Parker thinks she has found the perfect place for a fresh start when she moves her family from the Midwest to a sleepy suburban neighborhood in an idyllic southern town. Leaving a position as a serious journalist to write fluff pieces for a local paper is a compromise she is willing to make to escape the past and rebuild her family.
Ten years earlier, Ben and Mary moved to the same neighborhood in search of their own fresh start, leaving a trail of death and disfigurement in their wake. Now that cancer has taken Mary, a blossoming friendship with the Parker family offers Ben a glimpse of the things he missed out on and the child he and Mary were denied. As he questions the sacrifices he made to be with Mary and the evil he harbored to protect her, that evil has set its sights on Sarah’s eleven-year-old son, Sam, putting the entire town in danger.
Dark bleatings, my whispering tribe! I’ve got a spooky novel to talk to you about today, and I’m a little bit excited because this is a book I was able to sink into. As you all know, I am forever battling an enormous TBR pile – especially with the amount of review requests I get – and I’m also currently partaking in a reading challenge, so every now and then, the joy of reading dulls a bit. However, it’s wonderful when an immersive book comes along and makes me forget about all of that, as this one did.
We mostly follow a kid called Sam, and this poor dude is getting bullied by some tyrant up the street called Tyler. Sam likes chatting with an older neighbour (a very nice, wholesome dude), is fascinated by nature, and enjoys spending time looking at creatures by the river. He’s also just discovering liking girls, and is at that age where no matter what’s going on, he just doesn’t want his mother to know about it because parents have a habit of exacerbating situations when they try to help with anything. In a nutshell, we already don’t want anything bad happening to Sam, which makes it all the more disturbing when a creepy disembodied voice whispers in his ear that it wants to be friends, and it needs Sam to give it a name.
We also occasionally get chapters from the perspective of an abhorrent cretin called Jacob, and we don’t know where he’s headed, but the obvious fear is that he’s for some reason heading to a town near our beloved Sam.
When I think about it, there’s quite a lot going on here; coming of age tale, bullying, adolescent themes, grief and loneliness (which we get through the nice neighbour), supernatural creepiness and an impending but unknowable threat, and of course, the human danger element that must somehow come into play with Jacob. One could say that there’s almost too much going on, but thankfully, the author’s writing style married all of these elements together so seamlessly that it never feels like too much to think about as you’re going along.
One of the things I liked the most was how she blended Jacob into the central narrative, because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out quite where he was going to fit. The reason for his inclusion was even scarier than what Sam experiences, and also this guy’s back story served as a great extra dose of panic when it comes to the main characters. His past experiences really amplified the horror in the central narrative by giving us a sneak peek of what might be to come.
Overall, I’d describe this as a coming-of-age creature horror with great heart, and I’d recommend it to horror fans. If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
Bleeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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