Elmwood

by Ian Karraker

Overview

Nestled between the Green Mountains of Vermont and the shores of a dark, sinuous lake, is a town with terrible secrets. A secret that followed a young father home from Vietnam. A secret that haunts a housewife's waking dreams. A secret that killed three children in a forest clearing. A secret lurking in the gray waters of the lake. They all have something to do with eight-year-old Tommy Wilford-quiet, shy, strange little Tommy Wilford. And a mysterious figure, a killer, the center of a cold case twenty years old and counting: an evil known to the authorities only as the Highwayman.

When FBI agent David Nolan arrives at the mental institution where the now-grown Tommy is held in the summer of 1999, he expects only to retread the same steps taken by countless investigators before him. What he finds instead is a story-multiple stories, weaving and intersecting through the year 1978, plotting Tommy's path from happy child to ruined adult. And something else as well, something much darker and more sinister, something cruel and unknowable. Something that might still be out there...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798987847923
Publisher:	Gray River Publishing
Publication date:	09/01/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	506
File size:	2 MB

Editorial Reviews

"Childhood horrors, social outcasts and bullies, a fearsome supernatural entity, and gruesome deaths...the book evokes palpable dread and terror." -Kirkus Reviews

"Detailed, atmospheric, and eerie...a psychologically intriguing horror novel." -Foreword Clarion Reviews

From the Publisher

2023-07-24
In Karraker’s horror novel, an asylum inmate may hold the key to unsolved murders committed 20 years ago.

In 1999, FBI Special Agent David Nolan visits Green Elm Home to interview Tommy Wilford about a series of unsolved murders in Elmwood, Vermont, which Wilford may have witnessed in 1978, when he was 8 years old. It’s just a formality, Nolan reassures Wilford’s attending physician: “It’s the kind of nothing job that comes up when someone wants a promotion.” Wilford’s story, which involves tentacled monsters, is the same testimony that got him committed long ago, but he’s sticking with it: “I’d say I know a lot of things,” he eerily says. The narrative extends all the way back to 1968 in Vietnam (“A lot of messed up stuff happened there,” Wilford notes. “It’s no wonder some of it followed people home”) and is told from a variety of perspectives, including Wilford’s childhood classmates Elise Smithfield and Will Ross,who survived an initial attack that took the lives of two of Tommy’s childhood tormentors. Are these the “fantastic ravings of a certified lunatic,” as Nolan initially characterizes them, or, in classic horror tradition, is something still out there? It’s too soon to determine if Elmwood will become a destination for horror fans on a par with horror master Stephen King’s Castle Rock, Maine, but in his debut novel, Karraker does an effective job of scene-setting and worldbuilding. Several elements will be familiar to King fans, including childhood horrors, social outcasts and bullies, a fearsome supernatural entity, and gruesome deaths. The various pieces of the puzzle don’t fit together perfectly; how Wilford knows what went on in other people’s homes, for example, is a mystery. However, the book evokes palpable dread and terror, as when one character is described as “frozen in fear, the sanity vanishing from her eyes.”

A fine introduction to Elmwood, which horror fans will find a nice place to visit.

Kirkus Reviews