Author: David Bernstein
Genre: Horror, Dark Fiction
Age Group: Adult (18+)
Rating: 3 stars
Purchase: Amazon
Review copy provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
They want the children!
Someone is taking children from their homes on Roanoke Island and gruesomely slaughtering their families.
After a small, hideous-looking creature is discovered at one of the murder scenes, Chief of Police Marcus Hale realizes whatever is responsible for the killings isn’t even human. Hale suspects a bizarre link to the past, to the end of the 16th Century, when the island’s first settlers disappeared, leaving only the word Croatoan carved into a tree.
But something far more sinister than he ever imagined is at work. And if it isn’t stopped soon, the entire island’s population will perish. Just like it did so many centuries ago.
In Goblins, the horror starts from the first five pages, and from then on, it’s a never-ending, gore-filled ride of creepy twists and turns that, if it doesn’t manage to creep you out, at least manages to make you lose your appetite. What starts with an innocent baseball game soon turns into a murder on a little boy, and to a group of goblin-nasties invading the nearby town. Everyone is on high alert but police is in the dark about what exactly they’re fighting, until one resident realizes the goblins are a blast from the past, and that if they’re not stopped, the whole town’s population will disappear the way they did centuries ago.
Chief Hale, one of the police officers, is the storyteller for most of the time. He’s a no-nonsense type of guy forced into a horrible situation. We don’t get a lot of background on him, but that doesn’t matter much as the focus is on the action and on whatever horrific is going to happen next. However, at times when the character’s background is explained, this often coincides with the action sequences, which doesn’t always work well. Especially toward the end where it’s obvious some characters won’t survive and yet the author still dives into their backstory, it made me skip a few paragraphs, if not pages, to get back to the action.
This book’s main quality isn’t the creep factor, but the gore. Since the horror is immediate, there’s no real fear to be felt, but the gore is described in graphic detail and it works well. The end result is a fun blood fest of a book, featuring goblins.
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