Hekla's Children
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
An ancient evil lurks just beneath the surface of our world in this “fast-paced and terrifying” horror novel inspired by folklore and mythology (Booklist).
Four children disappeared. Only one returned.
A decade ago, teacher Nathan Brookes saw four of his students walk up a hill and vanish. Only one returned—Olivia—starved, terrified, and with no memory of where she’d been. Questioned by the police but released for lack of evidence, Nathan spent the years trying to forget.
When a body is found in the same ancient woodland where they disappeared, it is first believed to be one of the missing children, but is soon identified as a Bronze Age warrior, nothing more than an archaeological curiosity. Yet Nathan starts to have horrific visions of the students, alive but trapped. Then Olivia reappears, desperate that the warrior’s body be returned to the earth. For he is the only thing keeping a terrible evil at bay . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The past is not dead in this time-looped horror tale that tries to elevate the mundane to the legendary but only succeeds in making it tragic. Nine years after three high school students disappeared on a hike, mummified human remains are discovered in the same park. Nathan Brookes, the teacher who chaperoned the missing students, returns to the site to encounter a puzzled archaeologist. Dating the corpse indicates it is 3,000 years old, but it also shows a modern surgical repair. And Nathan has a vision of Bark Foot, a local legend whose description matches the mummy. When Sue, the only student to return from the hike, kidnaps the archaeologist and goes off to meet Bark Foot, Nathan decides to follow her trail, no matter how far into myth it seems to lead. Brogden presents a believable set of characters all struggling to deal with the unforeseen and their own desires. Unfortunately, the central tragedy that twists the plot lacks the grand passion or obsession that would believably warp history into horror.
