Thursday, December 21, 2017

The Chalk Man - C.J. Tudor

Current TBR List: 16
Currently Reading: 6
Books Finished in December: 21

A free e-book from Penguin First to Read in exchange of an honest review.

The Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor
Publication day: January 9, 2018


BAM BAM BAM
Damn…The opening, the first chapter… You are hit with a lot very quickly when you start this story. Very gruesome things so the squeamish beware.

I absolutely loved the way this book started. Yes, it does drop off and becomes a more mellow mystery after the opening but the horror that was inspired in the start remained with you and hooked you to see what the hell happened.

Told in past and present we follow a group of friends from Eddie’s perspective. The little group of misfits ride around on their bikes, hang out around town and in the forest. A gift of chalk and an inspiring talk with a teacher leads to secret messages being left, a secret code of chalk men to say who was calling and where they were going. A fun little prank leads to very real dead and dismembered body in the woods.

Though nothing is the same after finding the body Eddie was not expecting the chalk man to show up again, especially not decades later. Each friend receives a note with the ominous drawing and the solved mystery is reopened for the friends, especially when one of them turns up dead.

Reading this story, especially after the huge revival hype around It by Stephen King, all I could think of was “is this set in Derry? Is chalk man a euphemism for creepy ass clown?”

We have a group of misfit boys and one tomboy girl that has an abusive father. The similarities continue from there. There are the bad kids in town that molest and terrorize everyone else. Lots of unexplained deaths and creepy drawings and visions. Where It relied on supernatural though there was nothing  supernatural in this story. The events in this story could actually happen. Everything that happened was horrific. What made it even more horrible was the ending. That last little bit of extra the author puts in. So normal, so every day and yet…

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