About fifteen miles west of Stauford, Kentucky lies Devil’s Creek. According to local legend, there used to be a church out there, home to the Lord’s Church of Holy Voices—a death cult where Jacob Masters preached the gospel of a nameless god. And like most legends, there’s truth buried among the roots and bones. In 1983, the church burned to the ground following a mass suicide. Among the … survivors were Jacob’s six children and their grandparents, who banded together to defy their former minister. Dubbed the “Stauford Six,” these children grew up amid scrutiny and ridicule, but their infamy has faded over the last thirty years. Now their ordeal is all but forgotten, and Jacob Masters is nothing more than a scary story told around campfires. For Jack Tremly, one of the Six, memories of that fateful night have fueled a successful art career—and a lifetime of nightmares. When his grandmother Imogene dies, Jack returns to Stauford to settle her estate. What he finds waiting for him are secrets Imogene kept in his youth, secrets about his father and the church. Secrets that can no longer stay buried. The roots of Jacob’s buried god run deep, and within the heart of Devil’s Creek, something is beginning to stir…
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405 pages
4 and 1 / 2 stars
Thirty years ago some brave adults managed to rescue six half-siblings from certain death at the hands of their murderous father, Jacob Masters. Jacob is both evil and depraved. He worships the “Old God.” His fifty-seven followers are enthralled and completely subordinate to Jacob’s will.
In 1983, the fifty-seven died along with their master in a raging fire that destroyed the Lord’s Church of the Holy Voices in Devil’s Creek. (The clue is in the title…) Or did it?
Some years later Jack Tremly one of the six surviving children and now a famous artist in New York returns to Stauford Falls and nearby Devil’s Creek to settle his beloved grandmother’s estate. He’ll have it sorted and be out of town in a day. Right?
But something has awakened and Jack and his half-siblings must do battle for their very souls.
This is a remarkable horror novel. The characters are wonderfully drawn and are all shaped by their childhood experiences at the hands of the “followers” and Jacob Masters. They are flawed and all too human. As they all move forward toward their individual fates, they must find within themselves that something which will help them survive…or not. Mr. Keisling’s novel ranks right up there with the best of this genre. His words are carefully considered and evoke colorful and horrible scenes. But the horror is not overdone. All in all, a wonderful job of evoking pictures on pages. Well done, Mr. Keisling!
I want to thank NetGalley and Silver Shamrock Publishing/IBPA for forwarding to me a copy of this very good thriller for me to read, enjoy and review.
DEVIL’S CREEK, by Todd Keisling, is a horror novel that has all of the main components I look for in a great read. We have fantastic, fully fleshed-out characters, an atmosphere that switches between “worn-down” and “menacing”, supernatural, occult, and even a bit of coming-of-age.
Thirty years prior, a “religious” zealot–Jacob Masters–who worshipped “Old gods” and depravity, held sway over a group of people from Stauford, Kentucky. A few stood up to him and managed to rescue six half-siblings: Jack, Stephanie, Chuck, Bobby, Susan, and Zeke.
That was hardly the end, though.
After the death of his Grandmother and guardian, Genie, Jack returns to set her affairs in order.
“. . . he realized the shadow trailing him all his life hadn’t really left at all . . . ”
Keisling weaves his novel between glimpses of the past events, the current state of each of the six siblings, and the “awakening” of things that had previously lie dormant.
“. . . They called us the Stauford Six. The cursed Devil’s Creek kids . . .”
With Genie’s death, something long dead is free to rise once more, intent on spreading the perverted beliefs he once did in life. And now all six of his children were home.
“. . .he’d turned toward something older, something far more dangerous, something malignant sleeping beneath the earth . . .”
The characterization–of Jacob Masters and his followers thirty years prior–and of the six half-siblings and their current day acquaintances, was so detailed and complete that I felt as if I had known them all their lives. Though none of them–mentally–escaped their youth unscathed, they each went on in various directions of their own.
“. . . What happened out there in those woods all those years ago defined her . . .”
The town also projected the perfect backdrop for a story of this magnitude and direction. A small town–with no new growth–populated by bigoted, corrupt systems, and virtually no prospects facing those youth unlucky enough to have been born there. Isolated from the rest of the world by the cursed landscape as well as the opinionated residents, Devil’s Creek truly was a place all of its own, without any outside interference.
“. . . What I do believe is there are things in this world we aren’t meant to understand.”
Todd Keisling has created an inescapable atmosphere where readers can truly believe that evil and . . . older things . . . still exist, unchecked by modern civilization.
“. . . Something hidden. Something horribly old . . . ”
His combination of characters, legends, atmosphere/location, and imagination created a nightmare that I found myself completely immersed in.
And I loved every minute of it!
Some family legacies are more . . . lethal . . . than others. For the six Devil’s Creek siblings, things are about to come back to haunt them in a much more literal way.
“Family’s family. You can’t change that . . .”
Certain to be on my list of “Best Reads of 2020”.
Highly recommended.
**Releasing June 16, 2020. You can pre-order your copy here: https://amzn.to/2WkSbZ8 **
A powerful tale of small town cosmic terror. Todd Keisling paints the sins of the father on the kind of sprawling canvas not seen since the heyday of the epic horror tome. Devil’s Creek is the haunted homecoming Clive Barker might have penned if he’d come of age in the backwoods of the Bible Belt. Deep, dark, and provocative.
Devil’s Creek is the book that should make Todd Keisling a household name for horror fans. I fully expect it to see mentioned in the same breath as Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, with Keisling’s Stauford, KY standing alongside those east coast terror towns of Derry and Castle Rock, ME. Stauford’s a special place to visit, but I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live there!
Thirty years ago, a group of children were born and raised to serve as sacrificial pawns in Jacob Masters’ death cult. Masters, their father, was stopped and the children were saved, but they’ve carried the memories and scars of that violent night with them ever since. Some, like Zeke, have gone on to become drug dealers, while others, like Stephanie have found a modicum of success, building their own hard rock radio station that has earned the ire of the town’s most devout worshipers. For Jack Tremly, he’s turned his decades worth of nightmares into lucrative pieces of art. After his grandmother’s death, he returns to the town he left behind years ago — just in time for everything to go south after two children go missing.
Devil’s Creek is freaking nuts, and Keisling kicks the action off in grand fashion, opening the book with a high octane set piece that feels more like a gung-ho climax than a proper starting point. And in some ways, it is just that — it’s a climax to Master’s legacy as leader of the Lord’s Church of Holy Voices, and the upsetting of his plans to kill half a dozen kids on behalf of his nameless god and in service to The Old Ways. It’s violent and kinetic, and, good lord, it’s only just the beginning! Instead of serving up an “and they lived happily ever after,” Keisling instead charts a course for the aftermath, jumping ahead 30 years and into the present-day to show us what became of those children, the Stauford Six.
Jack Tremly is our central character here, but we also become acquainted with his brothers and sisters along the way, all of whom are the offspring of the deranged Jacob Masters. Some have continued their father’s work in secret, while others live each day in disavowal of the man’s memory. In Jack, we see just how much damage Masters has caused to these children’s bodies and psyches. As Jack uncovers more of his grandmother’s secrets, though, we also learn of darker, more arcane rites and although Masters’s church and many of his followers may have been destroyed decades previously, remnants still persist. In the woods where Masters used to conduct his sermons, something evil is lurking and growing hungry, and demanding fresh followers.
Keisling crafts several moments over the course of Devil’s Creek that are legitimately scary, and the work as a whole is a masterful blend of the occult, creature, and cosmic horror, with a few dashes of body horror thrown in for good, disquieting measure. I will admit, I have thing for horror scenes involving eyes, and it always, always, always makes me twitchy when a book or movie starts forecasting some kind of violent damage being done to a person’s eyes. Well, Keisling freaked me out good a few times with some of his more ocular-focused descriptions, and the sort of creepy-crawly terrors that set their sights on Stauford are absolutely brilliant in their awful and bloody depictions.
While the supernatural elements are top-tier, the human elements of Devil’s Creek are just as salient and help ground the work in a much-too-relateable fashion. Stauford is right in the heart of the Bible Belt and it’s a town built firmly on the typical foundations expected of such locales, namely hypocrisy and bullying. Despite being Bible thumpers, the people of Stauford aren’t exactly quick to turn the other cheek, preferring to mock, attack, and attempt to censor whoever has ruffled their feathers of late. It’s the type of town that wants to see Stephanie’s radio station, Z105.1 The Goat, shut down but no doubt listens to Rush Limbaugh and prays for his good health because he’s such a decent, upstanding human, votes Trump, and has banned Harry Potter books from the local library if they haven’t already burned them all. The good people in Stauford have either left town, like Jack, have died, like the vilified Mawmaw Tremly, or are social outcasts, like Stephanie and her goth nephew, Riley. This isn’t all to say that Devil’s Creek is overly political, for those of you who gnash teeth over such things — it’s certainly less “political” than the preceding sentence here! — but it does capture a very specific culture and belief system of a modern-day, small Bible Belt town, and it feels all the more realistic for it.
It is, in short, the perfect place for evil to brew.