Who Says Quiet Horror Can't Have Horny Teenagers?

     Because it most certainly can. To be fair, the thrust of Michael Rowe’s Wild Fell isn’t about horny teenagers, and their misadventure is important to the plot and not meant to be a cheap thrill. We learn the fate of a pair of teenagers who die tragically in 1960 before meeting Jameson Browning, the novel’s protagonist.

     Jamie has a few problems on his hands, including a father that lives with Alzheimer’s. He has also been in an accident that has left him with a boatload of money. The condensed version of his is that he buys a house on Blackmore Island called Wild Fell without ever visiting the property (kinda kooky, isn’t it?). While there, he begins experiencing things that will make the reader rather uncomfortable (you have no soul if they don’t, just sayin’).

     At any rate, Wild Fell isn’t your ordinary kind of house, but then it wouldn’t belong in a haunted house novel if it was. It’s true that Wild Fell embodies some fairly traditional ghost story elements, but Rowe’s handling of it sets it apart from the rest. Too many people say that you can’t do anything new with the ghost story, that it’s all been done to death. That simply isn’t true. There are standard elements to the ghost story, but a talented author can take those elements in God knows how many directions.

     And that is what Michael Rowe has done with Wild Fell. Saying that his treatment of the ghost story is imaginative would be unfair. Inventive is a much better word, in my opinion. Rowe takes the story in directions that I really hadn’t expected, not that surprises are necessarily the be all and end all with me. The fact that the direction was genuinely creative and tempting was much more satisfying. It does

     I know I haven’t hit too many specifics about the book in this post—it would be way too easy to spoil good parts of the book if I did. What I can do is recommend this book. I read it on my Kindle, but there’s a part of me that wishes I’d bought the hard copy. I would have something to sit on my shelf, something to be preserved.

     But then I would have waited slightly longer to get my mitts on it, wouldn’t I?