BLACK RIVER ORCHARD - Chuck Wendig

In the rural town of Harrow there is an orchard. An unusual orchard with seven unusual trees. The trees produce an apple that is such a deep red as to be almost black. The taste of the apple is incredibly sweet and eating an apple from one of these trees will have you wanting another. And then another. To say they are addicting is to understate their power.

One person knows the secrets of the orchard and one fall, just at harvest time, a stranger arrives in Harrow and the magic in the apples is revealed and those rare few who haven't taken a bite of the precious fruit will find themselves in mortal danger.

I will admit from the start that I am not particularly objective because I really like Chuck Wendig's writing. It is just the right shade of dark and dreadful.

Wendig gets just every part of this story just right. The characters are to die for (pun intended). Everyone here is carrying baggage. We may not see it or be privy to it, but we can sense it's there by the way the carry on, by the way they interact with others, by the very fact that Harrow has such a hold over them. Our central characters have baggage, but also promise and it's this promise that keeps us going because there's no way we would want to spend much time here if we didn't think someone would step up and fight.

The story is simple and yet, like a tree, it's roots are deep and sprawling. Pay attention to those prologues!

One of the many things I like about Wendig's work, and this book in particular, is that even in the early portion of the novel, when things are still at their brightest, there's still a sense of dread spreading through the story and then it just hits - almost without warning (except truth is, we've been warned from page one) we're in a horror novel and it's too late to back out. You can't spit out the apple once you've punctured its flesh with your teeth.

This is a long novel, even by today's standards (600+ pages) but it moves along well and you don't really get the feeling that it's somewhat epic. The story is well contained and tight and it needs no pruning.

Looking for a good book? If you enjoy being brought into a world and then having that world shaken up and take a dark, eerie turn, please let yourself go into Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig.

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

4-1/2 stars

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Black River Orchard

author: Chuck Wendig

publisher: Del Rey

ISBN: 9780593158746 

hardcover, 640 pages