Lost Hollow constable Graham Gordon just walked into his abandoned childhood home for the first time in twenty years. Local teenagers have been spreading rumors about disembodied screams coming from inside. Now, thanks to a rickety set of cellar stairs and the hateful spirit of his dead father, he might never escape.Meanwhile, Channel 6 News feature reporter Afia Afton—whose father is the victim … the victim of a local decades-old hate crime—is meeting with town administrator Patsy Blankenship. Her mission is to develop a ghost story feature for a special to air on the station’s Halloween broadcast. When Patsy tells her about the screams at the Gordon place, the past and the present are set on a collision course with potentially catastrophic results.
Can Graham come to terms with his father’s past and redeem his own future? Can the murder mystery that has haunted Afia for most of her life finally be solved?
It’s a fight for the future and the past when spirit and flesh wage war at the Gordon place.
more
The Gordon Place is my first go around with Mr. Thorne’s work, although I’ll admit I’ve had his collection Road Kills on my radar for some time.
The synopsis/premise of The Gordon Place, is itself intriguing. The small town of Lost Hollow has one constable, Graham Gordon. Graham returns to his abandoned childhood home. The house itself holds horrible memories from his youth, and he’d vowed to never return. But now duty calls and he must.
Meanwhile a newscaster whose father was a victim of a horrible hate-crime returns to Lost Hollow in the hopes of uncovering a solid ghost story to run. Something that’ll bump her ratings but also, hopefully in the off chance it happens, answer some questions she’s always wished answered.
It doesn’t take long before the constable and the newscaster’s paths cross and they discover their pasts are intertwined in ways they’d never imagined.
Thorne does some magnificent character building in this story. He starts off with a foreword letting us know that there’s some very unsettling content within, and the truth of the matter – there is. But set in the context of the story, the time line/years of occurrences and the nature behind why it’s all included make perfect sense and I never once felt uncomfortable in the sense that it was excessive. Don’t get me wrong, the story line that goes with it is highly uncomfortable, but it has a purpose and for that Thorne deserves some tremendous props.
The ghost story included is fascinating, even while only making me feel creeped out a few times. The ‘creature’ within that rear’s its head a few times was unsettling, but overall this read more like a well-paced drama then a gore filled haunted house tale and it worked really well.
Thorne has some serious writing chops and every time I jumped back into The Gordon Place, I was easily whisked away to Lost Hollow. This was a hard one to review based on the fact that it’s tough to go too far into what the story holds without giving away major spoilers! That says a ton about the depth included within the pages.
The Gordon Place is a chilling paranormal tale that kept me turning the pages. The writing switches between the past and modern day, and presents a tense and creepy story.
Duty calls and, as the only constable in the small town of Lost Hollow, Graham Gordon has returned to his childhood home. A place where his mother left him to be beaten and abused by his alcoholic father, who has now been dead for many years. Graham has an accident and because of the run-down state of the house, he can’t get out.
Meanwhile, reporter, Afia Afton and cameraman, Joe ‘Staff’ Stafford are on their way to Lost Hollow to film a ghost story feature. B&B owner, Patsy, has a tale to tell them about the local entity, The Black Bitch, a dog with a human face.
Afia left Lost Hollow as a child, after someone murdered her father, a few years after her mother had disappeared, and she’s never been back until now.
Graham and Afia’s fathers had bad blood between them, but no-one knew, or cared, about how deep the hostility ran, or the extent of Lee Gordon’s hatred, until the events in the book run their course.
An intriguing and creepy, haunted house story with ghosts, spirits and possession. Not for the easily offended as the antagonist is a vile and abusive racist.
When Graham decides to return to his childhood home, he’s not sure what to expect. The place has been abandoned for years, and in the shadows lurk his memories. The worst of which are tied to his father. To save himself, he must get to the bottom of his father’s twisted past.
A unique twist on a haunted house tale. There’s quite a bit of racism in the story which made it hard for me to get through because I was constantly rooting for the downfall of most of the characters. The author did a good job of showing three different POVs, and their way of handling the prejudice in the small town. This story has plenty of tension to draw you in and hold you tight.
Narration was okay.
This book was given to me for free at my request and I provided this voluntary review.
The storyline in this book has a lot of promise….classic horror with a haunted house, creepy black dog creature, people with old hangups and hidden guilt, and the like. The writing was what caused me to give a lower rating. I normally prefer books that are longer, and ones where the author goes into a lot of detail, but this one felt overdone to the point it took away from the story itself. There were constantly sections that just seemed to drag on and on with explaining something to death that could have been said in a much simpler way and gotten the same point across. I ended up skimming some pages and skipping entire paragraphs just because it wasn’t important and basically rehashed the same thought over and over.
Some people are going to be completely turned off with some political/racist/etc content. The author does warn you upfront in the beginning, but again I felt he went overboard, and it seemed there was more focus on that at times than the underlying story. There is one entire chapter near the beginning where I actually went back to read what the book was about because it felt like I had been pulled into a political commentary book instead of a horror. This may all go back to just the way the author goes into such lengthy detail and maybe just needed to be simplified a bit. That chapter probably could have been a third as long and still gotten the same points across on the attitudes of the characters. It gave an overlying angry tone to the story, and it caused me to find it hard to want to read it as it took away from that entertaining horror I was looking forward to.
All-in-all, the story itself is okay. I wouldn’t avoid the author due to the above and may try another book in the future by him.