The Nightmare Man
A Novel
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
T. Kingfisher meets Cassandra Khaw in this “fast-paced” haunted house story full of “old-school horror” and “brimming with edgy tension and evil” (Library Journal)!
When the terrifying plot of a horror novel comes to life, its author discovers there’s a fine line between humanity and monstrosity . . .
Blackwood mansion looms, surrounded by nightmare pines, atop the hill over the small town of Crooked Tree. Ben Bookman, bestselling novelist and heir to the Blackwood estate, spent a weekend at the ancestral home to finish writing his latest horror novel, The Scarecrow. Now, on the eve of the book’s release, the terrible story within begins to unfold in real life.
Detective Mills arrives at the scene of a gruesome murder: a family butchered and bundled inside cocoons stitched from corn husks, and hung from the rafters of a barn, eerily mirroring the opening of Bookman’s latest novel. When another family is killed in a similar manner, Mills, along with his daughter, rookie detective Samantha Blue, is determined to find the link to the book—and the killer—before the story reaches its chilling climax.
As the series of “Scarecrow crimes” continues to mirror the book, Ben quickly becomes the prime suspect. He can’t remember much from the night he finished writing the novel, but he knows he wrote it in The Atrium, his grandfather’s forbidden room full of numbered books. Thousands of books. Books without words.
As Ben digs deep into Blackwood’s history he learns he may have triggered a release of something trapped long ago—and it won’t stop with the horrors buried within the pages of his book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This over-the-top horror thriller from Markert (The Strange Case of Isaac Crawley, written as James Markert) follows the residents of a small town with a surprisingly high number of serial killers in its history, as they attempt to solve a slew of recent killings. Bestselling author Ben Bookman doesn't remember writing The Scarecrow in a three-day fugue at Blackwood Mansion, his family's mysterious estate, but the specifics of the plot are starting to come back to him—mainly because the novel's gruesome death sequences are beginning to occur in real life. As the authorities—including fresh-faced Detective Blue and grizzled veteran Detective Mills—close in on the answers, Ben contends with two possibilities: that he himself is the killer, or that it's something old and evil that's been waiting within Blackwood Mansion for a chance to be unleashed. The resulting tale is a fairly standard thriller: its plot points are ripped from a dozen other well-worn stories, and its characters react to the story's hyper-stylized murders in ways anybody faintly familiar with the genre would expect. Markert's clipped style works well for this unsubtle celebration of the genre, however, making the plot's hammier excesses easy to get through as it reaches its bloody conclusion. Fans of old school horror will want to check this out.
