The Haunting of Modesto O’Brien by Brit Griffin
Publisher: Latitude 46
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Mystery/Suspense/Thriller, Paranormal, Historical
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by AstilbeA gothic tale from deep within the boreal forest…
Violence and greed have intruded into a wild and remote land. It’s 1907, and silver fever has drawn thousands of men into a fledgling mining camp in the heart of the wilderness. Modesto O’Brien, fortune-teller and detective, is there too – but he isn’t looking for riches. He’s seeking revenge.
O’Brien soon finds himself entangled with the mysterious Nail sisters, Lucy and Lily. On the run from their past and headed for trouble, Lily turns to O’Brien when Lucy goes missing. But what should have been a straightforward case of kidnapping pulls O’Brien into a world of ancient myths, magic, and male violence.
As he searches for Lucy, O’Brien fears that dark forces are emerging from the ravaged landscape. Mesmerized by a nightmarish creature stalking the wilderness, and haunted by his past, O’Brien struggles to maintain his grip on reality as he faces hard choices about loyalty, sacrifice, and revenge.
Sometimes a kernel of truth is more than enough to get things started.
One of my favorite horror tropes is the existence of ominous woods, and the nearly-endless forests described in this tale were definitely filled with danger. I’ll leave it up to other readers to decide for themselves where the supernatural explanations ended and the realistic one began for the many ways a person could be injured or die out there, but what I can say is that the ambiguity of that in certain scenes only made me more interested in parsing out all of the possibilities.
The large cast of characters meant that I didn’t get to know most of the characters as well as I would have liked to and I sometimes mixed their names up. It would have been helpful to have more time to figure out who was who, perhaps with more vivid descriptions of their personalities, interests, and physical features so that I could more easily imagine what it would be like to meet them. As much as I wanted to give this tale a higher rating, my confusion in this area prevented me from doing so.
This was a good example of how to keep an audience guessing with exactly the right number of clues about what was really going on. The mystery storyline was my favourite one, and I kept changing my mind about what might happen next. There is definitely something to be said for keeping an audience on their toes. Reading this made me hope that the author releases another book soon as I’d sure like to have the opportunity to review it.
The Haunting of Modesto O’Brien was deliciously scary.
