Hearthstone Cottage by Frazer Lee
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Hearthstone Cottage by Frazer Lee
Review of a NetGalley eArc.
Four friends travel to the Scottish Highlands for a post graduation holiday, and of course things go terribly wrong.
Mike, a party hard kind of guy, and his girlfriend Helen begin to drift apart. Their friends Alex and Kay seem to just be along for the ride, while Alex’s sister Meggie, the vegetarian artist, haunts the fringes.
This felt like a very confused book from the beginning. It starts off like a pretty traditional “folk-horror” story, with legends of witches and creepy locals mocking the city kids, but then the growing fixation on Mike’s drinking and weed smoking starts to feel like an 80s slasher morality story.
There is plenty of chilling atmosphere and gross-out horror to satisfy the horror feels, but I honestly felt so disgusted by Mike as a character that I just didn’t care what happened to him. The tension eventually just became a sense of wanting to know how much of what was happening was actually in his head.
Then comes the end and you realize nothing at all had anything to do with what just happened, and the story falls apart.
So disappointing.
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Jim Rion - Translator & Writer 