Review: Something Wicked This Way Comes by Amy Rae Durreson

Title: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Author: Amy Rae Durreson

Publisher: Self-Published

Length: 343 Pages

Category: Contemporary Romance, Paranormal, Horror

At a Glance: There’s a lovely romance in this story that finds its own way amidst the trauma and turmoil of the horror, and the author conducts each chapter and verse of Something Wicked This Way Comes with the skill needed to integrate it all into a fantastic and entertaining read. Fans of the genre will appreciate the goose bumps in these pages.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: As an orphaned child, Leon owed his survival to his school. Now an adult and a teacher at that same school, he’s determined to repay the debt. When an old boy leaves them a ruined orphanage in the Scottish Borders, he heads north to assess the mysterious old building, Vainguard.

But Vainguard’s history is more terrible than he could imagine. As Leon explores, he discovers that his own tragic past is entwined with Vainguard’s, and with the stories of all the children who have died there over the years. Joining forces with local blacksmith Niall, who is still mourning his own daughter, Leon starts to peel away the layers of secrets that hide the truth about Vainguard.

But something is watching his every move—something ancient, bloodthirsty, and ready to kill again…

Content Warning: This book deals with issues of historic child abuse.

Review: “By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.” ~ William Shakespeare’s Macbeth

There’s little I love more—at least when it comes to reading—than a good ghost story. The things that go bump in the night, the soughing of the wind on a dark and stormy evening, shadows that the light can never quite penetrate, a phantom stirring caught out of the corner of one’s eye. Amy Rae Durreson’s Something Wicked This Way Comes encompasses each of those requisite traits of the horror genre, and then some, but it isn’t just a good ghost story. It’s an excellent one.

Set in a village on the border between Scotland and England, Durreson uses the landscape and the legend of the area to great effect, adding in her own touches to deliver what will become a chilling story of child abuse and murder. The curse upon Vainguard, a gothic monstrosity set on the English side of the border, dates back decades, but the area’s history, intermingled with Scotland’s, goes back centuries. The year is 1944, innocence is lost—to misfortune, to the war, and at the hands of the wicked—a malevolent spirit is summoned and unleashed, and that evil will go on to wreak havoc upon children in the quiet countryside for decades to follow. It is a wickedness that feeds on the blood of innocents, and Leon Kwarteng might have become a victim of that malevolence were it not for the efforts of strangers who’d had a hand in its resurrection. As it was, however, Leon was orphaned at the age of six, and that single turning point in his life would go on to shape the man he would become.

Leon’s journey to Blacklynefoot wasn’t one of choice but of duty to his job as a teacher at Eilbeck House, a school for disadvantaged and at-risk youth. Becky’s Children’s Trust has unexpectedly inherited Vainguard and so his adoptive father, Felix, sends Leon on a mission to scout the location for a potential, and badly needed, new school. Durreson doesn’t rely on this as a convenient mode to deliver Leon into danger, though. Leon was being managed by a stranger, unbeknownst to him, and his arrival in Blacklynefoot is a direct link to a past he barely recalls, an apprehension of the events that killed his parents and which left him alone and afraid, and it ends up tying into his meeting Niall Forster—a man whose own brush with the evil that lurks will tie him to Leon in unexpected, but ultimately fortunate, ways.

Niall losing his daughter in an automobile accident makes him imminently sympathetic in spite of his tendency towards surliness, if not outright hostility at times. His and Leon’s first meeting was an inauspicious one, at best, but time and their finding a common bond—albeit it a painful one—and then forging a friendship through that bond became key to everything that lay ahead of them. As they become more deeply entrenched in revealing and destroying the spirit that means to feed upon a young visitor, the investigation uncovers the deeds of human monsters too. And while Niall has brought Leon back from the brink of emotional breakdown on a number of occasions, it’s Leon who must rescue Niall from a timeless veil that exists between life and death.

A message of hope in the midst of sorrow, and forgiveness in the midst of wicked deeds and gross misfortune, prevails among the love of family, the commitment of friends and strangers alike, and the connection that grows between Leon and Niall. There’s a lovely romance in this story that finds its own way amidst the trauma and turmoil of the horror, and the author conducts each chapter and verse of Something Wicked This Way Comes with the skill needed to integrate it all into a fantastic and entertaining read. This novel is, by turns, eerie and haunting, touched by pathos and uplifted by a solidarity of purpose, and delivers an awesome scare or three along the way. Fans of the genre will appreciate the goose bumps in these pages.

You can buy Something Wicked This Way Comes here:
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