Book Description: Alex was Ian's five-year-old son: brilliant, earnest, and compassionate. He is dead now, but Ian can't let him go. When his wife urges him to move on, he drives her away. His performance at work collapses; his friends leave him. Six months later, alone in an empty house, Ian starts to see his son again. Every vision is a repeat of something the boy said or did in life: aching memories replaying themselves for Ian's eyes alone. Are these images of Alex real? Has Ian's son found a way back, to forgive or condemn his father? Or has Ian's sorrow metastasized into psychosis? With a masterful hand, bestselling Kindle Horror author Adam J Nicolai paints a picture of grief, madness, and the furious strength of a father's love for his son.
My Review and Thoughts:
"Donnie went off the road."
This is an emotionally powerful and haunting experience. The description word play mixed with the actions described, plays out like a real life reality taking place. It’s like your there living the haunting nightmare. I felt this story weaved itself into a tight, complex drama that fills itself with just enough spine tingling suspense and ghost like terror. I can’t imagine the state of mind of a parent who has lost a small child to murder. My parents lost their 4 year old daughter to cancer, and it affected them, there marriage, and even after 30 years, it’s still as raw as it was the day it happened. But murder, knowing your child suffered at the hands of another, I can not fathom the grief and personal destruction the mind could go through, and Adam J Nicolai describes that reality, and personal, emotional, haunting touch to this story, he makes it raw and real for the reader through Ian's emotional state.
Alex and Ian come to life. Ian becomes a figure that comes off the page. Ian is like any true loving father clouded by a tragedy. Alex is that sweet innocent 5 year old child that is brutally murdered. A father haunted, his reality stained and altered against the haunting reality of his son’s death. His life changed. He no-longer can just do average mundane things. His son, and his brutal death, is always on his mind. One day he starts to hear Alex’s voice. One day he starts to see Alex. But Alex is dead. So begins a truly haunting and emotional horror story of life and death.
The haunting brutality of reality melded with a sense of insanity is so thought out in word play, and actions on page, that the reader becomes so enthralled with the characters. The story is so deep and yet so dark, that it unfolds like a haunting ghost story that never lets up.
As you read chapter after chapter you become lost in a depressive state, right along with Ian. His dark nature of unraveling, slowly page after page, gets under your skin, haunts your mind, and brutalizes your senses. I read in the dark, with a book light, and so the creepy content can play vividly with your emotions making the book stand out, memorable in all it's words. The characters bleed off the pages. Alex becomes that haunting spectra of insanity, thought, murmur, glimpse out the corner of your eye.
It truly is written in away that the reader grieves. The reader can't help but feel sorry for Ian. You sense his anger, frustration, pain. There is a brutal emotional roller coaster. There is a graphic telling inside the word play that haunts itself off the page. Nicolai makes you believe, makes you understand, makes you follow deep inside the grieving, twisting plot.
When the book comes together, the final showdown and complex conclusion is a brilliant, edge of your seat satisfying ending that leaves the reader in total peace to the story that unfolded in great detail. Simply put this is a great read.
Would I Return to this Again: It really is a well thought out book. I possibly would return to it. The characters are amazingly written.
Would I Recommend: Absolutely, I feel this is a great trip into an emotional insanity. Nicolai tells a tale that any reader can cling to and become apart of. The darkened tale of grief, a haunting reality, a personal invasion of thought. The ultimate reality of trying to understand or figure out the real truth of what happened. Not only a mystery, suspense, but a twisted tale with the aspects of a ghost story.
Book Length: 300 pages
Four Words: Depressing. Brilliantly told. Memorable.