Title: Passing The Torch
Author: L.L. Sanders
Genre: Horror, Novella
Age Group: Young Adult and Up
Rating: 3 stars
Purchase: Amazon
Review copy provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
Deep in the Arizona desert live a girl and her dad, burying secrets—and bodies.
Mesa Kingston’s first memory of burying a corpse was at eight years old. Back then it had been the carcass of a large lizard her dad found that they buried in the backyard of their isolated cottage. At age fourteen, the body of a young lady accompanied the reptile’s remains, and ever since, an accumulation of female bodies began to grow. Now, the only way Mesa can stop the haunting screams of the dead is by drowning them out with flames. Or is there more to the blaze than even she can perceive?
Passing The Torch is a very short but dark novella about Mesa Kingston, a young girl living with her father. They often go to her father’s cabin to spend some time away from civilization. Yet, Mesa has memories of her father burying young women underneath the cottage. Each year, more and more women cry out to her from beyond the grave, and now, age eighteen, Mesa has decided to do something about it.
For such a short story, the author did a good job of fleshing out the characters. Mesa was intriguing. The other characters, police officers, her dad, were all sketched in a few short lines, but it worked.
The book is a novella, so it’s very short, and I wouldn’t have minded to read a full-length novel on this topic. As such, I found it an okay read but not long enough – too many details were missed, and it was slightly too abstract. Despite that, I did enjoy it and found it disturbing, in a good way.
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