My Rating- 4 STARS
Synopsis- In 1691 the town of Crossfall taught the witch Thessaly how to die. They beat her, they shot her, they hung her - but nothing worked. When they finally tried to bury her alive Thessaly set the field against them. The first man died as a gust of wind harrowed the meat from his bones. A root,flung like a dirty javelin, cut a second man down. Many more deaths followed. The Preacher Fell impaled the witch upon her very own broom but she dragged him down into the field to wait for three more centuries.
Three hundred years later Maddy Harker will murder her
bullying husband Vic. She will bury him in the field as she buried her abusive father years before that. The very same field where the revenant spirit of Thessaly Cross lies waiting. In three days Vic will rise again - a thing of dirt, bone and hatred.Men will call him the Tatterdemon. And Hell- and Thessaly - will follow.
My Review- I couldn't read this book late at night!
This book kicks off with a horrific bang and fills your imagination with scenes of madness and gore. It begins with a witch, who, due to her treatment by the townsfolk of Crossfall, curses all their descendants to suffer in nasty ways. They bury her in a field after several attempts to kill her, but this witch just won't die. A few hundred years later we are introduced to these 'descendants' and all their juicy little secrets.
There is not a single person in Cressfall who I consider entirely sane. There are murdered
wife-battering husbands, dead bodies in freezers, voodoo love spells, circus freaks and a perverted mailman. Everything is going on in this small town and I pretty much loved almost all the characters.
Steve Vernon writes in a similar style to what I have seen in Stephen King novels. He tells the story
from a dozen POVs, each with their own style of talking, their own naughty secret and their own personalities. All these stories begin to blend, starting a sequence of events that triggers the curse and wakes the witch. An unsuspecting Maddy, who has lived through years of torment and pain at the hands of her husband, Vic, comes to the end of her tether and hits him and buries him in the same field as the Witch. He comes back to life as the Tatterdemon, a servant of the witch, and hopes to build himself a terrifying undead army. And that isn't all....the dead are coming back to haunt the people of Crossfall!
I really liked this book. The characters were well developed, the story is fun and scary and gory. Somewhere in the middle I did become a little desensitized to the gore, but towards the third part I quickly became freaked out again. I will look forward to reading more by this Author.