Reviews

What an epic tome of a book! Fantastic characters that became like family to me while reading this, and a story that was frightening and deep. Todd weaved an incredible story of a town called Stauford in Kentucky where their god doesn’t live above, it lives below. The MC Jack is an artist who creates macabre paintings that depict a traumatic experience that happened as a child, and he becomes famous for it. He returns to Stauford to visit his grandmothers grave and things start to go south from there. So well crafted and beautifully designed, this book needs to be at the top of your tbr!

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5.0

4.5*, rounded up to the full five

I've been looking forward to reading Devil's Creek for a while, to the extent where I was worried about putting potentially unfair pressure on it to match my excitement. After all this is my first time reading Keisling, and certain expectations come from handing yourself over to a new-to-you author for 500+ pages. First of all, will the story hold your interest? Can they make you care for the characters, while taking them on a believable yet emotional journey? In the case of horror, can they provide those chills and that imagery that makes you shudder? And, the question that makes many of my favourite established writers falter, can they stick the landing and bring the hours you've spent with the story to a satisfying, conclusive and earned ending?

I was so pleased, then, to find Devil's Creek managed to more than live up to my hopes for it.

Without delving too far into spoiler territory, and this is something that's clear early on, at the centre of the story is a religious cult. One that delves into the darker areas of this world; check your triggers for child abuse, power dynamics and control, rituals, sacrifices. The core group of characters are siblings, with different mothers but the same fanatic father, who manage to survive the experience. Fast forward a few decades to the present day, and they all end up back in the town of Stauford, as it begins to feel like these cult-like events are happening again.

I've seen comparisons made to Stephen King, and that shorthand is pretty much what you'd expect here—it's mostly all set within the same small town, with an insidious evil lurking under the surface, you've got the sprawling cast of characters, there's essentially a good versus evil story at the core. Keisling has done a wonderful job at making each character feel distinct and fully realised, I very rarely found myself having to stop and remember who was who, with their own voices quickly coming through loudly to me as I read. Technically the writing is excellent, with some descriptive passages I immediately found myself re-reading to enjoy again, the author having a knack of creating crystal clear images of a scene in my mind. The ending—thankfully—was a fantastically creepy experience, both getting under my skin and proving to be satisfying. If this was a climax that King wrote, I would expect it to be held up as one of his best.

This isn't going to be a novel for everyone, I'm sure. It's long, especially by the standards of a lot of independent horror, and will somewhat make demands of your time and attention. In return though, Devil's Creek will reward you with a story you can spend hours and hours getting lost in, and take you on one hell of a ride. This feels like the kind of book that got me into the genre as a teenager and I can only imagine how hard my 14 year old self would have fallen for it.