Bernard Jan's Blog - Posts Tagged "jeremy-bates"

Black Canyon by Jeremy Bates

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I am so glad that Black Canyon is the first work by Jeremy Bates I've read. To be honest, since I have so many books waiting in line to be read – quite a pile on my table and in my Kindle, I wasn't planning on reviewing it at first. I wanted to save time and move on onto another book as soon as possible. But already in the first ten pages of this 2015 dark novella I knew this won't be the case, even if I reflect on it with just a few words.

It is a rarity to have an opportunity to read about the pre-teen young monster, who will grow into a new American psycho and a serial killer, from his own perspective. When a child (12-year-old Brian Garrett) tells you about the weekend camping with his parents in the Gunnison National Park in Colorado, you don't expect anything but the idyllic trip to the amazing and wild nature. And this is what you get. But coated with a few gory moments of surprise, very well timed twists, murders and true horror. The freakiest thing is the lightness with which Brian accepts his dark nature already at this early age, his calculated, heartless and almost mathematically precise survival instinct.

This is a quick-paced read about the seemingly normal but in truth one bad-vibed family which can be easily spotted and recognized too often around us, told in a simple and capturing narrative voice.

Black Canyon, which I also like to fondly call The Mean Innocence and The Growing of American Psycho, lingers in my mind with the aftertaste mixture of a novella and the movie Stand by Me and The River Wild movie, which I both quite liked, while Jeremy Bates, as an author, seriously competes to become one of my new darlings.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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Suicide Forest by Jeremy Bates

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Suicide Forest is as real as the remains of over a hundred of those who each year went to take their lives in silence or unheard screams in that "Sea of Trees".

When a group of friends ended up in Aokigahara just outside Tokyo, it wasn't because they wanted to commit a mass suicide or hunt the spirits who lingered between the branches of the trees. Bad weather prevented them from their original mission of climbing Mt. Fuji and nudged them into making a bad decision of spending the night camping in Aokigahara.

As the night closed over them, extinguishing every sign of life and light from the forest, their thrill of personally exploring Japanese legends turned into a bone-chilling experience when the first one of them went missing. The seemingly dead forest came alive with a face of terror that none of them wished to see as they wandered around in their frantic attempt to find a way back to civilization.

Jeremy Bates already bought me with his brilliant novella Black Canyon and he did it again with Suicide Forest, a gripping, chilling and full-blooded novel that leaves you no space to calm yourself as it tightens the rope around your neck and drags you up to its climax.

Suicide Forest is real, but if Aokigahara hadn't already existed as a beautiful creation and the final resting place for many, Jeremy Bates would have made it real.

Also read my review of Black Canyon by Jeremy Bates.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

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Bernard Jan



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The Catacombs by Jeremy Bates

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


From the catacombs, in a labyrinth of tunnels that extend over 300 kilometers under the French metropolis Paris, lurks something more than a darkness. More than a blackness in which you cannot hear or see anything.

In the resting place of six million dead, an unknown something waits for a group of friends who ventured there to investigate a mysterious footage of a discovered video camera. Something dangerous, sinister, something deadly.

The Catacombs are the second book in the World’s Scariest Places series by Jeremy Bates. A gripping page-turner hard to put down. It pulls us into its darkness with the strength of a secret which cannot wait to be revealed to us.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

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Bernard Jan



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