“Takes the girl-with-supernatural-powers-gets-pushed-too-far trope and makes it delicious again.” — Errant Dreams Allison can break your bones with her mind, and she can’t control her power.Now forty-five years old, she’s spent her life trying to stay away from other people. But a random encounter with a couple on the street leaves her believing that she may have done something horrible. … something horrible. Something unforgivable.
Killer-for-hire Daxton and his girlfriend Maggie know the truth. Instead of easing Allison’s anguish, they come up with a cruel plan to take advantage of it. But with Allison’s abilities exposed, there may be a grisly body count very soon…
From its shocking opening to its sinister conclusion, ALLISON is Jeff Strand at his over-the-top best!
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While you know that Jeff Strand is going to give you a solidly entertaining and good book (sometimes even great), you don’t always know what type of book you are going to get. Something with more humor than scares? Something gory and scary? Something completely different? If I was creating hashtags for this book, I would use serious, uncontrolledSuperPowers, and strandTrademarkHumor.
The story focuses on Allison. As a child, she had a traumatic life changing event occur to her and her family. An event that she was able to rescue herself from but in doing so she created an even more traumatic life changing event. Now she lives a life of solitude in order to avoid more trauma. Until one day when someone tries to take advantage of her.
As I mentioned before, since it is Strand, you know the story will be good. The uncontrolled superpower that Allison has is handled as I would suspect in real-life. Something scary and powerful and exciting. Also since it is Strand, you know you are going to get a lot of his humor mixed throughout the book. This time though, I think that was a negative. While I enjoy it at the moment, it ended up blending the characters too much. Allison and Cody (a guy she meets) end up being too similar; their voice in my head was the same. The mobsters were also a bit cliche in their approach. Overall I was left happy during the readying but then afterwards realizing that the characters were kind of flat.
This supernatural thriller had a funny yet lethal heroine, a quirky boyfriend, and a wicked villain. Loved this novel!
Finished It In Two Sittings
Well, I didn’t expect to finish this book in under 24 hours. I couldn’t put it down… I needed to know what was going to happen to Allison. Let me back up a second here. Allison is a… I guess a horror story. It’s a story about a woman who can hurt people (including breaking bones and worse) with her mind. She’s not sure how and she can’t really control it but it’s definitely a thing she can do.
The story starts with young Allison and the first time that we’re shown just how much power she has. It then morphs into a quick summary of what has happened to her over the last 35 years, settling in with 45 year old Allison. Little did I know, 45 year old Allison was just getting started.
The story flies by. I started it last night, and ended up listening to it on my lunch break today. I couldn’t wait to hear what was going to happen. I went into it assuming I knew where the story was going to go… but I didn’t. And I definitely didn’t see the ending coming.
I really enjoyed this one. It was the right length and had the right amount of detail in it to make it fun without bogging it down in details or over-explaining things.
Fun, fast-paced modernization of Carrie.
This was my first Jeff Strand novel, and I instantly got engrossed thanks to his tight writing style, wacky characters, and supernatural fun. Would highly recommend this one to anyone who enjoyed Carrie, as Allison draws heavy influence from King’s classic novel.