Deep, dark and gruesome
By Ian Woodhead
Reviewed by Mark Cantrell
ONCE again the delightfully twisted mind of Ian Woodhead has
concocted yet another cracking horror story – and this one really isn’t for the
faint-hearted.
Something demonic and nasty has latched onto Adrian and it’s
going to kill everyone he knows and cares about unless he can figure out how to
kill it first. If he fails, then not only is his girlfriend dead meat – he’ll
be left to take the blame.
Adrian is no angel himself. A middle class boy with a taste
for the bad-boy life, he’s chosen to work in a dead end job in a retail goods
store, and hangs out with a tough crowd. This rough-neck crew he hangs around
with know little of anything of his background, and he wants to keep it that
way. He thinks he’s tough enough to handle anything, until the demonic beastie
turns up and starts to tear its way through the people he knows, killing his
friends one by one in a gruesome manner.
The thing isn’t just killing his friends and acquaintances,
it wants him to see the gory details, and steadily draws him onto a horrifying
high-stakes mind-game. Tough – he ain’t seen nothing yet.
Typical of Woodhead’s work, his characters are rough and
ready types, denizens of the dubious side of life, seedy and violent, morally
ambiguous, and every bit the kind of people you ought to recoil from, but the
warts and all depiction of them as human beings, endears them to the reader.
Well, it’s essential if you’re going to be drawn into the story and care
what happens.
Again, the author doesn’t hold back on the gore either,
although having said that, it isn’t gratuitous in the sense of gore for gore’s
sake; rather a lubricant of good solid horror that leaves one in no doubt the
fragility of the human frame when faced with an entity that takes delight in
dismantling it.
Third Sight is deeper and darker than Woodhead’s previous
works, I found. The psychological twists and turns keep you unbalanced so you
never get that easy feeling of ‘oh, I’ve worked it out’; the reader like Adrian
is kept very much on the toes.
Were it not for some editing glitches that upset the flow
here and there, this would easily be a five star novel. As it is, the glitches
jarred even my rather resilient tolerance to such issues, to the extent that I
found it upset the flow of the story in places – to the cost of a star.
That’s a shame, because it is a rip-roaring read, a great
story, and deliciously gruesome horror with a psychological aspect that demands
it’s not read in neutral. This novel doesn’t coast – it’s rages along the
neural pathways and makes the mind shudder at the thrill of it all.
Mark Cantrell,
Stoke-on-Trent,
11 November 2011
Copyright (C) November 2011. All Rights Reserved.
Category: REVIEWS
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