THE BOOK OF ACCIDENTS - Chuck Wendig


 I've thought, longer than usual, on how to start this review. Often I'll start with a plot description -- too difficult with this book.  Sometimes I'll start with some general comments about other books I've read by the author -- been there, done that already with Wendig. And sometimes I'll dig right in and talk about what I really liked (or disliked) about a book -- again, too difficult with this.

Chuck Wendig's The Book of Accidents is a serious excursion into so many different horrors that it's difficult to summarize. 

We enter with a man in an electric chair. Serial killer Edmund Walker Reese who still maintains that the young girls he killed needed to die and he only regrets that the fifth girl got away. Mysteriously. And when the executioner flips the switch to send the killing volts into his body, he mysteriously disappears.

We meet Nate and Maddie Graves. Nate, a Philadelphia cop, grew up with a nasty, abusive father.  That father is now dying - painfully and slowly, just the way Nate hoped. But the father has left them the house in the country - a house Nate wants nothing to do with but Maddie recognizes the financial benefit to not paying city rent. So they move with their child to the 1700's-build farmhouse where things that shouldn't be, are.

And all the horrors that we recognize as deserving of their own book come to be just a drop in the bucket as we discover that alternate universes converge in darkness here.

Wendig combines the best of Lovecraftian horror with his own modern dark fantasy storytelling to deliver a very special, anxious horror.

This isn't a slasher novel and it's not full of splatter but it will gnaw at your spine and raise the goosebumps on your flesh, so if you like a story that will do that, look no further. Wendig has taken some risks by expanding on what he does so well, but it pays off.

Looking for a good book? The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig is one of those accidents you can't stop staring at, even though you know that what you see will give you nightmares. It's a great dark fantasy/horror story.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

4 stars

* * * * * *

The Book of Accidents

author: Chuck Wendig

publisher: Del Rey Books

ISBN: 0399182136

hardcover, 530 pages

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