This fast-paced novella has so many surprises packed into its pages, it's hard to believe so much can be packed into a short book, but Hightower's writing is tight and powerful, and she has a talent for the most haunting of scenes. Admittedly, there were moments where I wished for more description or that things had moved just a bit slower, but on the whole, I enjoyed this and I'm sure I'll seek out more of the author's writing.

Recommended for horror-lovers. ( )

IF YOU LIKED THE DESCENT, BELOW IS A MUST-READ!

Addy is on her first solitary road trip since her divorce, traveling through West Virginia under less-than-ideal circumstances to meet friends at a horror convention. She’s a reluctant long distance driver, her vision isn’t great in the dark, it’s starting to snow, and there’s a grinning lunatic in the middle of the road whose presence shakes her to her core.

Enter Mads.

A chance meeting at a truck stop unites Addy with a kind divorcee who happens to have a spare CB radio and is willing to be her guide through the tricky territory known by truckers to cause all manners of havoc, including electrical vehicle difficulties. Addy reluctantly accepts the helping hand, but when Mads’s truck jackknifes over a guard rail, it’s up to her to be the savior.

What unfolds next is a series of bad-to-worse events that push Addy to her absolute physical and emotional limits. This action-packed ride over the edge succeeds on so many levels. Brilliantly introspective, Below is a horror fight song for every woman who has ever felt under a partner’s control. Highly recommended. ( )

I loved this fast-paced little horror novella. It felt very cinematic and I can't stop thinking about how I want someone to adapt this for the screen! Without giving too much away, I got major "The Descent" vibes from this, yet it still felt original. Very much its own thing.

We follow our recently divorced female protagonist as she runs into issues driving through West Virginia on her way to a horror convention. Things go awry quickly and we experience the terror from the intimate perspective of the main character whose challenges could be seen as metaphoric just as much as they could be viewed as occurring in reality (I love when stories allow for both interpretations at once like that). The protagonist is likeable and easy to root for.
This is book has some great action and surprises packed into such a small page count. The pacing was perfect. As an avid horror fan, the horror elements absolutely delivered. Creepiness coming from multiple angles with the occasional shock sprinkled in.
I think it's safe to say this is my favorite horror novella. ( )

I picked up Below because I'd been blown away by the power of Laurel Hightower's novella Crossroads about grief and sacrifice and despair and hope and what happens when they all become focused on the loss of a child.

Below is a very different kind of story but it hit me just as hard. It's a disturbing, creature-feature, lone-woman-in-danger, action-packed story that became more and more unsettling as I settled into the situation and our heroine started to reveal who she was.

Part of what made the story unsettling for me was that it refused to follow a well-worn genre path. This is part horror, part science fiction, part thriller and all strange. I liked that not all of the strangeness was explained. How can you explain the truly strange anyway?

The pace of the story kept accelerating but it didn't rush along in a straight line to an inevitable conclusion. Instead, I had to keep reassessing what was really happening and why. Like Addy, our heroine, every time I thought I knew what was going on, it turned out that something different and worse was coming my way.

The story starts with a fast pace and a tight focus that never lets up. We begin with a simple statement, part shock, part fear, part denial, part apology: It came out of nowhere and not a pause for breath after that. The statement is made by Addy, a lone woman in an almost deserted truckstop at night, on a remote mountain road in winter with a storm coming on. She'd be driving when suddenly, it came out of nowhere and changed her life. Now she's holding a coffee cup in her shaking hands and she's about to change the life of a trucker, the only other customer in the truckstop.

It takes a while to discover what it really was that came out of nowhere and who it came for and why, but even in that first scene, even before the darkness and the pain and the fear, it was clear that it would come again and that things were going to get worse.

What I liked most about the story was that, without slowing the pace of loosening the focus, this thriller became focused on the heroine as much as the plot. Addy is not the typical heroine. She's a recently divorced woman whose confidence has been maimed by the years that she's spent with her overbearing husband. She was doing something daring for the first time in years, driving through the night to meet friends and then it came out of nowhere nowhere. Addy isn't a superhero, She has no special powers or expertise that will be revealed in extremis. She's a woman who has only just begun to rediscover her confidence in herself and who is about to be plunged into an ordeal that she may not survive. As the story rushes forward, Addy's personality is revealed along the way by every reaction she has and every choice she makes. By the end, I understood her better than I understood what had happened to her. I'm pretty sure she felt the same way.

I've been impressed by what I've seen from Laurel Hightower so far. I'm now looking forward to reading her debut book, Whispers In The Dark. ( )

Loved it! Review coming soon! ( )