The Curse of Crow Hollow

     I'll be honest - the cover is what drew me in again. And the title was just so fitting, I couldn't help but be interested.

     With good reason.

     Not 30 pages in, I decided that I would do a review on this book. I was unsure about the first chapter, but as it got into the story it became what I had hoped for from the cover.

     Curious. Dark. Chilling. Engaging.

     There is a writing style for every emotion and every mood under the sun, and Bill Coffey has managed to capture a very peculiar, very rare atmosphere in a Frank Peretti-Ted Dekker-esque way, while still maintaining a style of narration unique unto himself.

     He introduces his story first as the narrator, welcoming you into town and spilling all of the place's deepest, darkest secrets all at once before he decides to explain more fully what has happened in the area to make everyone act so strangely. So he opens the story with some details about a few teenagers going to a party for the most popular people in the town. It's the place to be. If you're not there, you're not anywhere worth being, and kids take that to heart.

     What starts off as a daughter borrowing her mother's bracelet without permission - with every intention of giving it back, mind you - turns into a case of a lost valuable in a forbidden wood with four terrified teenagers awakening the wrath of a dormant witch.

     Coffey paints a very dark picture with the hard lives of his characters; the sin that they're enveloped in and the generational pain that just keeps coming back around. This witch that they disturb is years bitter as a widow after her husband was killed, and she blames everyone in the town at the bottom of the mountain. They avoid her at all costs - or they're supposed to. It's not hard, with her living as secluded as she does. But with the town kids as they are, daring, curious, and rebellious, even ingrained terror and rumours don't keep them away.

     They awaken the curse, and there is no going back.
   

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