Madman Across the Water By Caroline Angel – A Book Review

Blurb:

For generations one family has been haunted by something… something that stalks. It sees and listens, it watches and follows. In the shadows and mist it waits, to take you, to hurt you, perhaps to kill you. If it doesn’t kill you, you’ll wish it did. A creepy, suspenseful saga of family, horror, and mystery, this is one story sure to leave you frightened of the woods at night, fog, and all things tall and slender.

Author: Caroline Angel
Pages: 233
Publisher: Red Cape Publishing
Release Date: 17/03/2020
Genre: Horror
My Chosen Format: Kindle
My Rating of ‘Madman Across the Water’: 4 out of 5
Purchase: Amazon UK, Amazon US

Review:

In Madman Across the Water we are treated to a creepy creation that gives you a good reason to avoid your local woods.

One family has seemingly been haunted by the curse of a faceless entity that lurks within the woods. For years people go about their lives, thinking the tales nothing but myth and local legend. And then children are abducted, sparking people to wonder if the legend was a reality.

The story is told, predominantly, across three time lines. We have the 1800s, the 1960s and present day. Its a race against time for those in the present day to learn from those of the past as to how to stop the creature that stalks them.

For the most part, the writing is really good, its just the last ten percent or so that seems riddled with typos and editing misses. Not a drastic downside (I perhaps make it sound worse than it is) but its very noticeable due to how well the previous 90% came off.

The characters were believable and interesting. The entity itself was intriguing and the thought of having that thing after me isn’t a happy one!

Regarding the creature, I like how it wasn’t a one-trick pony. It had a lot of grizzly, creepy things that it could do to hurt you and seemed equally fond of both physical and psychological torment, which was a nice touch. Really gave it some depth.

I thought the continuity with the time lines was handled well (it would have been easy to mess that up). I especially liked how, despite each timeline was essentially telling the same story, the author managed to keep it interesting.

My main downside would be how certain things were revealed. One character would be thinking about a certain character and leave things very vague. A few chapters later we find out those characters are related. Considering how certain characters go into so much detail about pretty much everything, it just felt a bit strange that things like that would be left unsaid until a later date. The reveals of such things didn’t seem to have any jaw-dropping impact on the story, well, other than for me to sit there thinking ‘why am I being told this now’?

Also, I know its the title, but the word ‘madman’ gets over-used a lot. I also felt some of the speech (not that speech is easy to nail down in writing) felt a bit off. Almost robotic. More often than not, abbreviations were ignored in favour of using two words and it just ruined the flow of the speech (‘it is’ instead of ‘it’s’, ‘do not’ instead of ‘don’t’ etc …). Due to that, some of the sentences read in a way that no english-speaking human would speak.

On the whole Madman Across the Water is a great read and I’m happy I came across it.