The Taking of Annie Thorne by C.J. TudorMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
A horror story.
Like Stephen King.
After reading the blurb and the first couple of chapters it is clear that this story shares tropes with some of Stephen King's horror novels. From It comes the trope of middle-aged people being summoned back to their old home town to face an old evil that they had had to deal with when they were at school there. And from Pet Sematary comes the trope of the revenant, someone who returns from the dead, but is not quite the same.
That isn't a spoiler, it's right there in the blurb, and becomes evident in the first couple of chapters. And in the acknowledgements the author acknowledges her debt to Stephen King, and he himself wrote an endorsement of the book. So if you liked those two books by Stephen King, you'll probably like this one, and if you didn't, you probably won't.
Having said that, it also isn't written by Stephen King. The setting is different, the characters are different, and the way they interact is different. Above all, the style is different.
It is set in a small former coal-mining village called Amhill or Arnhill (the typeface isn't clear) in Nottinghamshire in England. It is written in a first-person, present-tense style, though the flashbacks to the past are written in the past tense, and the narrator, who is the protagonist ("hero" would be something of a misnomer) lies not only to most of the people he meets, but also to the reader as well. And most of the other characters lie to him too. As a result there are several unexpected plot twists, with some suspected villains turning out to be less villainous than the unsuspected ones.
It's a good story, if you like that kind of thing, and I do.
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