Harrow Lake

by Kat Ellis

It's an old-fashioned puppet. The details are hard to make out in the dim light, but it looks like the puppet's neck is broken. It's a sad-looking thing, trapped there in its cage. Maybe I should let it out...

THE MUST-HAVE THRILLER THAT WILL KEEP YOU GRIPPED, KEEP YOU GUESSING, AND KEEP YOU UP ALL NIGHT.

'A captivating and creeping mystery full of brilliantly twisting turns and dark secrets' - Holly Jackson, bestselling author of A Good Girls' Guide to Murder

'If you like Stephen King, snap this up!' - Cass Green, Sunday Times bestselling author of In a Cottage in a Wood

'This book crawled under my skin and made itself a home there, and I can't wait for people to start reading it so that I can scream about the ending with everyone I know' - Inkandplasma book review

'Scream meets The Babadook in small-town USA' - Kirsty Logan, award-winning author of The Gracekeepers

Lola Nox is the daughter of a celebrated horror filmmaker - she thinks nothing can scare her. But when her father is brutally attacked in their New York apartment, she's swiftly packed off to live with a grandmother she's never met in Harrow Lake, the eerie town where her father's most iconic horror movie was shot.

The locals are weirdly obsessed with the film that put their town on the map - and there are strange disappearances, which the police seem determined to explain away.

And there's someone - or something - stalking Lola's every move.

The more she discovers about the town, the more terrifying it becomes. Because Lola's got secrets of her own. And if she can't find a way out of Harrow Lake, they might just be the death of her...

• ISBN10: 0241397049
• ISBN13: 9780241397046
• Publish Date: 9 July 2020
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Penguin Books Ltd
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 320
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/isbn/9780241397046

Reviews

[Jo]

Quick fire review.

- Harrow Lake by Kat Ellis is the second book I read after craving some horror, but was again another disappointment.
- There are secrets being hidden in Harrow Lake, and those secrets become fairly obvious to the reader. And they're not great secrets. But they're nothing like what you expect.
- From about half way through, you realise what kind of story this actually is, and that nothing is really going to come of it. And as a horror novel, it quickly becomes ridiculous. Why is Lola so fixated on the myth of Mr Jitters? When nobody else is.
- Harrow Lake is meant to be a horror, but it absolutely isn't a horror at all. People might want to call it a psychological horror, but I'd disagree. It would be a great book to read if you wanted to read about mental health and where the mind can take you. But as a reader, expecting to be scared, it was majorly disappointing.
- This book had one moment that was truly scary; when a puppet - the one of the cover - moves of it's own accord. It's a moment, and that's it. But once you realise what's actually going on, which is really obvious to the reader, so isn't scary at all. There was a lot of eye-rolling.
- I finished the book thinking, "Really? That's it?" Honestly, it felt like a waste of my time.
- I want to point out that my negative reaction is about this book being a horror and the aspects that were meant to be scary, not at Lola's mental health. This book should have been marketed differently, I might have had a completely different reading experience.
- Other people really enjoyed this book, so do read other reviews before deciding whether or not you will.

Trigger warnings: This book features child abuse, domestic abuse, and discussion of suicide.

[Eve1972]

This book was okay. It was suitably spooky and atmospheric, but it was also choppy in places. Plot lines were introduced and then dropped. It was also a little confusing to follow at times.