Ryan C. Thomas

The groundwork for all the horrors that come later is as follows: we’re in a small town on a baking hot summer’s day, and two twenty-year-olds, Roger Huntington and his buddy Mervyn (“Tooth”) Elliot, are fooling around with guns, shooting beer cans off branches and smoking weed.
    This is the kind of town we’re talking about here:

He stared at the mountains in the distance and narrowed his eyes. “You see that?” he asked.
    “What?”
    “That. That interesting thing over there …”
    “I don’t see anything interesting,” I told him.
    “Neither do I. I have to get out of this place. And soon.”

It’s going to be a lot sooner than he thinks though. Next day the two of them set off up into those New Hampshire mountains, an hour or so’s drive into the woodlands near a place called Bobtail Mountain: no mobile phone reception, and nobody around—apparently. But then the screaming starts, coming through the trees, a woman screaming.
    This (extreme horror) is pretty much a new genre for me, so I’ve no idea whether this is a standard set-up, something more unusual, or what. I liked the writing though, and there’s a nice balance between what is shown full-on in gruesome anatomical detail, and what isn’t, what is only hinted at, what might be happening next door so to speak; and the suspense is done well too. For someone not knowing quite what to expect, I was pleasantly (or should that really be “unpleasantly”?) surprised.… (meer)