Pleasant Brook is a hamlet in the Adirondacks with a constable and a few businesses. Only a handful of people have ever left the small town, and when they do, they tend to return. When one of these wayward residents comes back to find a creepy mask in an abandoned house, quiet life in the small town quickly unravels. Fighting the slowly growing evil is a teenager who conveniently knows a lot about horror plots, the town librarian, and the constable. To the reader, it is obvious this force is woefully inadequate, and we must wonder if Pleasant Brook can be saved at all.
This book took me a long time to finish. I had a hard time getting back into it every time I picked it up. I enjoyed the construction of the evil. It was an interesting take on a new monster, integrating Celtic mythology and maybe a little alien invasion. My main complaint is the same as a few of the other reviewers: A new character is introduced in a chapter, lots of backstory on them, and they die by the end of that chapter. Each victim has the same description of their attacker, the same sensory experience, and a similar death. These chapters were very formulaic, and when you started one, you knew exactly how it was going to end. That took some of the excitement out of the narrative for me. Though filled with classic tropes I love in this type of story (the rag-tag band fighting the evil, the small-town feel, the stereotyped characters), they weren’t carried through to the end. The main drunk that joins the rag-tag team for a while, for instance, doesn’t get to make it to the end for his redemption. He’s sober from the beginning, never backtracks, and never has to prove himself to the rest of the team.
Reading Kevin Lucia's "The Horror at Pleasant Brook" taught me something about crafting horror novels, so I can still recommend it to readers who are interested in a deep-dive into the genre and its tropes. I received it from NetGalley.
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