{I've Been Reading} The Fabled Oak

About fifteen years ago, I read some horror novels by Simon Clark and really enjoyed them. At the time, most of his books were only available overseas and the budget didn't stretch quite far enough for me to order them off of ebay, not without cutting back on the cross stitch supplies.  Now, I've got more of a book budget and some of those books have been made available on Kindle. (Did I mention how much I love these e-readers?)



The Fabled Oak is apparently part of a series. Ghost hunter Byron Makangelo and his team have been summoned to a high-tech hippy commune to investigate "Tree Face" a menacing apparition that terrifies the group's children. I've been unable to find a list of the books in the series, but this definitely wasn't the first. It felt like I'd started watching a random episode of an established television series. Although I had to figure out who was who, the ancient oak with its centuries of offerings was interesting enough to pull me in. And the story behind the tree was truly haunting.

I can't recommend On Deadly Ground. It's one of the books I was trying to find a decade ago, so I was looking forward to reading it. The book is long, almost seven hundred pages, and I found myself skimming over pages and pages of graphic gore and sex that did nothing to advance the plot. The whole thing is told from the point of a nineteen year old boy and it takes forever for him to figure out and explain why the world is ending. All we know is that the ground has become hot and the members of humanity who aren't dead yet have been reduced to cannibalistic savages. The apocalypse does start to get interesting near the end, but for me it was too little too late.

So I'd recommend one book but not the other.  I'll definitely be downloading some of the other titles I missed when they were first published.

Disclosure -- the publisher provided me with ARCs.