Those Across the River

Wow, that was fast! Just last Monday I wrote about the new bookclub that just got founded on App.net and that I’d probably not find the time to read this month’s assignment, and here I am having finished “Those Across the River” by Christopher Buehlman in record time (for me). Surprisingly what sold me on this book wasn’t the teaser available for the Kindle, but the first 10 pages of it. The rest of the sample and in general the first half of the book wouldn’t have convinced me ;-)

Failed academic Frank Nichols and his wife, Eudora, have arrived in the sleepy Georgia town of Whitbrow, where Frank hopes to write a history of his family's old estate-the Savoyard Plantation- and the horrors that occurred there. At first, the quaint, rural ways of their new neighbors seem to be everything they wanted. But there is an unspoken dread that the townsfolk have lived with for generations. A presence that demands sacrifice.

Synopsis on Goodreads.com

If you read the synopsis you might expect some kind of horror story out of this but the first about 40% have virtually nothing of that (with a short (about 10 pages) exception). You get to know the main characters and their background stories, getting to know the small fictional town of Whitbrow in Georgia. But then, all of a sudden, all hell breaks loose and the book completely shifts pace for the rest of its 357 pages with horror, action and tons of drama related to what happened in the woods next to the town at the end of the American Civil War.

The book is set in the 1930s and focuses quite heavily on slavery and the US at the turn of the last century. But the actual horror parts go into a slightly different direction which I won’t spoiler here :-)

If you like fast paced stories (and can live with the first 40% of the book being mostly introductory) and are not averse to the horror genre, you should give this book a try :-)