Title: That Night in the WoodsAuthor: Kristopher Triana
First Published: October 13, 2023
Publisher: Cemetery Dance Publications
Pages: 370
Genre: Horror
Format: eARC
Source: NetGalley
Rating:
Synopsis:
When Jennifer receives a message from Scott Dwyer after twenty years without contact, her first reaction is one of excitement. Scott was her first love. Now in her forties and in the middle of a divorce, nostalgia for her youth gets the better of her.
Scott invites Jennifer to his house in Redford, the town she grew up in. It's a place she's tried to put behind her, for not all childhood memories are sunny. When she accepts Scott's invite, she struggles with mixed feelings, especially when she learns of the death of Steven Winters, one of her childhood friends.
Scott invites three people from their past to honor Steven's memory-Corey, Traci, and Mark. But the group is more than old friends. They share a dark secret that has troubled them for decades. Now it's time to face their traumatic pasts. Together, they must unravel the mystery of what happened in the patch of forest behind Scott's house, a place once known as Suicide Woods.
Buy the Book: Amazon, Author, PublisherReview
That Night in the Woods is a wild ride of a horror story that screams Halloween. The story follows a group of old friends coming together 25 years after a Halloween night that went terribly wrong. The first half of the book follows two timelines and takes its time fleshing out all of the main cast of the characters. It’s a steady build-up to what happened on that Halloween with a pace that felt like climbing the first hill on a rollercoaster. I enjoyed the amount of detail that went into each character and liked each one, particularly Jennifer and her extreme thirst for her former beau. There’s something mysterious about the woods and the mild hints that all was not right in the town were genuinely creepy.
The first half of this book gave me horror blockbuster vibes with Don’t Fear the Reaper blaring, it was a great set-up. Once the story of what happened in the woods was finished, that middle transition trying to set up the last half of the book slowed to a crawl and the book started to drag a little bit. While I like complex group dynamics filled with past love and betrayal, everyone was just so horny. It was amusing at first but all the lamentations about wanting to sleep with other characters eventually became repetitive.
I was glad when the second half finally picked up and it was pretty action-packed, dipping into extreme horror slasher territory which I loved. The reveals are surprising but also mildly disappointing, I would have liked a little more payoff from the build-up and I felt the story was a little too shaky with it’s reasoning. The ending completely lost me and strangely felt anti-climactic. A shame after such a strong start, so it left me feeling pretty middle of the road with this one.
“Don’t be afraid.”
Quote
“Danger bonded people together.”
Content Warnings
View Spoiler »About the Author
About Kristopher Triana
Kristopher Triana is a Splatterpunk Award winning author. His works include Full Brutal (Awarded Best Novel at the 2019 Splatterpunk Awards), Toxic Love, Shepherd of the Black Sheep, The Ruin Season, Body Art, The Detained and Growing Dark. His fiction has appeared in many magazines, anthologies, audio books and on websites, and has been translated to multiple languages. His fiction has drawn praise from Publisher’s Weekly, Rue Morgue Magazine, Cemetery Dance, Scream Magazine and such prominent authors as Brian Keene, Jack Ketchum, Bryan Smith and Ryan Harding. While primarily a horror writer, he also writes crime fiction, literary fiction, noir and westerns.
Born in New York in 1977, Triana was yanked down to Florida at the age of nine and was forced to grow up there, much to his chagrin. Luckily he had heavy metal music and John Carpenter movies to get by on. Once he was old enough, he escaped all that pesky sunshine and since then he has lived up and down the east coast, from New England to the rural Carolinas. He is obsessed with all aspects of the horror genre and has amassed a staggering collection of cult films, horror books, movie memorabilia, busts and Halloween masks. He also has a very strong love of animals—especially dogs.
He lives in Connecticut.
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