Welcome to Harrow Lake. Someone’s expecting you . . .
Lola Nox is the daughter of a celebrated horror filmmaker – she thinks nothing can scare her.
But when her father is brutally attacked in their New York apartment, she’s swiftly packed off to live with a grandmother she’s never met in Harrow Lake, the eerie town where her father’s most iconic horror movie was shot.
The locals are weirdly obsessed with the film that put their town on the map – and there are strange disappearances, which the police seem determined to explain away.
And there’s someone – or something – stalking her every move.
The more Lola discovers about the town, the more terrifying it becomes. Because Lola’s got secrets of her own. And if she can’t find a way out of Harrow Lake, they might just be the death of her.
If you know me, you know that I don’t read many horror novels. I am typically too much of a scaredycat to get to the good parts of the story, and some books/games have been able to really shake me to my core. But when quarantine came around and I found myself still in a book slump, I knew I needed to read something different to shake things up. So I turned off the lights and started this book at around 11 PM. By the time I was 30% of the way through the book, I had to turn the lamp back on, and I knew that I wasn’t going to sleep until I had finished this novel.
Lola was an…interesting character. She is introduced as this antisocial character who steals for the sake of “seeing if she could do it”, but when her father is stabbed, she has to go to Harrow Lake to live with her grandmother. Harrow Lake just happens to be where her father found her mother to star in his hit horror film, so she knows that many secrets lie within this town. As the book goes on her character fleshes out a lot more. She goes from being a character that no one could connect to being a character who has been kept trapped into being told how to feel by everyone around her for years.
Mr. Jitters has to be one of the scariest psychological horror characters that I have seen in a long time. Is it just a childhood scary tale that everyone still somewhat believes in like the Boogeyman? Or is there genuine evil within the city limits of Harrow Lake? The other townspeople of Harrow Lake are also rather eerie. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was really wrong with the town, and I still couldn’t figure it out once the book was over, but something definitely went wrong in this town after the mining accident in 1928.
The atmosphere that the story has is amazing. I could feel the tension build in certain scenes when Lola couldn’t even trust her own eyes to tell her the truth. I felt at some points like I was watching a horror film rather than simply reading a book, the imagery was so descriptive. In a few scenes, I could even feel my skin crawling as I was reading the pages. There were a few sentences that missed the mark though, such as “Her hands wring together in front of her, two pale moths feeling their way blindly.” I don’t know, I just couldn’t compare hands to being like moths in my mind. But most of the description was perfect for each setting.
The thing that brought my rating down to 3 and a half books for this title was the fact that the ending felt so rushed. There was so much amazing buildup and I was looking forward to how it all tied together. Then, when the climax was reached, Kindle told me that I only had around 11 minutes left in the book. A lot of my questions were left unanswered and disappointed me a lot. I was looking forward to seeing what would happen with a lot of these different stories, but then I felt like the threads connecting the book together were just snipped at the end. I didn’t feel a sense of satisfaction like I thought I would at the end of the story.
Overall, I would still recommend this book to anyone looking for a new psychological horror story to read. The rest of the book is simply too good to let the end deter you from enjoying the journey.
I received a copy of this book and this is my voluntary review.
Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5 books
