House Of Skin by Jonathan Janz – Book Review

PUBLISHERS BLURB

Myles Carver is dead. Myles’s wife, Annabel, is dead too, but she is also waiting, lying in her grave in the woods. For nearly half a century she was responsible for a nightmarish reign of terror, and she’s not prepared to stop now. She is hungry to live again…and her unsuspecting nephew, Paul, will be the key.

MY REVIEW

Paul’s Uncle Myles Carver has died and left him a house……so he leaves his old life and Emily and drives to the small town of Shadeland where the house and estate of Watermere is…..

He arrives late, finds the key left for him by the lawyer, Ted Brand and explores a little before falling asleep….The Police visit the next day as Ted is missing…

A neighbour, Julia knows where Ted is.

Paul hears rats in the walls and feels the need to get out of the house….he explores and finds a graveyard ……and also meets Julia.

“When he reached the large black tombstone, all he could do was stare”

Paul and Julia begin a relationship, but something is off……

Told from the perspectives of Julia and Paul with little jumps back to show the history of the house with  Myles, Annabel and David…

No spoilers, so I can’t give too much away, but this is an immensely moody and unsettling tale which gave me the spooks….that feeling of something sat in the shadows….just waiting….

Jonathan Janz writing certainly set my nerves jangling with his Lovecraftian tale of a waiting Evil….I can thoroughly recommend it for lovers of clever, modern horror with a nod to the gothic.

Thank you to Anne Cater and Random Things Tours for the opportunity to participate in this blog tour and for the promotional materials and a free copy of the book  in exchange for my honest, unbiased review.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan Janz grew up between a dark forest and a graveyard, which explains everything. Brian Keene named his debut novel The Sorrows “the best horror novel of 2012.” The Library Journal deemed his follow-up, House of Skin, “reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Peter Straub’s Ghost Story”
Since then Jonathan’s work has been lauded by writers like Jack Ketchum, Edward Lee, Tim Waggoner, Bryan Smith, and Ronald Kelly. Novels like The Nightmare Girl, Wolf Land, Savage Species, and Dust Devils prompted Thunderstorm Books to sign Jonathan to an eleven-book deal and to give him his own imprint, Jonathan Janz’s Shadow Side.

His novel Children of the Dark received a starred review in Booklist and was chosen by their board as one of the Top Ten Horror Books of the Year (August 2015-September 2016). Children of the Dark will soon be translated into German and has been championed by the Library Journal, the School Library Journal, and Cemetery Dance. In early 2017, his novel Exorcist Falls was released to critical acclaim.

Jonathan’s primary interests are his wonderful wife and his three amazing children, and though he realizes that every author’s wife and children are wonderful and amazing, in this case the cliché happens to be true. You can learn more about Janz at http://www.jonathanjanz.com.

 

FLAME TREE PRESS is the new fiction imprint of Flame Tree Publishing. Launching in 2018 the list brings together brilliant new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices.

HOUSE OF SKIN Jonathan Janz
Publication date: May 2019