Sunday, October 11, 2015

"The Curse of Crow Hollow" by Billy Coffey

My personal rule of starting a new novel is 100 pages.  I'll give any book 100 pages before making the decision on whether to continue and spend the investment of my reading capital.  Sometimes I give it up, if the book fails to draw me in, or I find it just not my thing.   Stephen King's "The Tommyknockers" - gave up.  "Deadwood" by Pete Dexter, a tremendously popular book by fans and critics - the pacing was all off for me, and I couldn't finish.  "Lamb", by Christopher Moore, again, a majorly popular writer - I didn't make it to word one on page 101.  And others, usually horror novels by lesser known authors, have been stricken by the 100 page rule.

You can see where this is going.  "House of Leaves", reviewed previously, made it well past the 100-page test.  "The Curse of Crow Hollow" didn't.



The first 50 pages of "The Curse of Crow Hollow" were fine, were engaging if not gripping, and set the stage for what was potentially a good October supernatural read.  A small group of teenagers in rural, southern Crow Hollow, instead of going to a party in the usual teen spot in Harper's Field went to The Mines, the legendary, haunted, forbidden place where teens in a horror story always go.  Terror starts when a stolen diamond bracelet is re-stolen, and cloven hoofprints seared into the hard ground, up and down trees, and ending then re-emerging across a pond lead to the bracelet at the remote cabin of the local rumored witch.  The teens encounter the witch herself, and hear the raging roars and growls of something, presumably the owner of the cloven hooves, locked inside the shed.  The teens escape, but not without terrifying consequence.

Sounds good so far.  Teens in trouble.  A witch.  A Jersey Devil-like thing imprisoned and controlled by the witch.  Promising.

The next 50 pages though, for me, didn't resonate.  The focus shifted to the parents and other adults in Crow Hollow, their reactions to the returns of the teens, and bits and pieces of backstory.  The story moved along slowly, losing the tension that had been established earlier.  Perhaps this was foundation-building for a terrific story - I'll never know.  Disinterest took hold, and I set the book aside.

The story was written partly in the usual omniscient third-person narrative, but also partly in first-person, Crow Hollow-resident storyteller point of view.  These styles wove in and out too seamlessly, and it was distracting to me as a reader.  The lack of consistent voice was ultimately what led me to give up and move on to another selection.

Billy Coffey has many fans, based on reviews on Amazon, and "The Curse of Crow Hollow" has many positive reviews.  It may be a perfect tale for many readers out there.  And, with Pete Dexter and Stephen King, Billy Coffey has fine company as an author whose one book just didn't strike a positive chord with me.  "The Curse of Crow Hollow" might be a great selection for you, but for me, it wasn't.

The publisher provided an ARC of "The Curse of Crow Hollow" for review purposes.

No comments:

Post a Comment