#Spooktober ‘The Bird Eater’ by Ania Ahlborn

About the book…

Twenty years ago, the mysterious death of his aunt left Aaron Holbrook orphaned and alone. He abandoned his rural Arkansas hometown vowing never to return, until his seven-year-old son died in an accident, plunging Aaron into a nightmare of addiction and grief.

Desperate to reclaim a piece of himself, he returns to the hills of his childhood, to Holbrook House, where he hopes to find peace among the memories of his youth. But solace doesn’t come easy. Someone—or something—has other plans.

Like Aaron, Holbrook House is but a shell of what it once was, a target for vandals and ghost hunters who have nicknamed it “the devil’s den.” Aaron doesn’t believe in the paranormal—at least, not until a strange boy begins following him wherever he goes. Plagued by violent dreams and disturbing visions, Aaron begins to wonder if he’s losing his mind. But a festering darkness lurks at the heart of Holbrook House… a darkness that grins from within the shadows, delighting in Aaron’s sorrow, biding its time

‘The Bird Eater’ by Ania Ahlborn was published in 2014 by 47North in ebook and Brilliance Audio in audiobook format- I listened to it on Audio as it came with the Kindle Unlimited subscription. And I also read it bec ause sometimes, I just don’t catch the nuances and am not sure how to spell names.

Laden with doom and foreshadowing, this is a deliciously dark novel of family hauntings and the sins of the older generations being passed down to their children.

It is also a novel of the process of grief, after all, how does a person ever come to terms with losing a child? And in such a senseless way? The nature of Aaron’s son Ryder’s death is so tragic and sad that his spiral into addiction to alcohol and medication is completely understandable and organic, he returns to his aunt’s house after her death in a fall, to rebuild his life, re-establish himself in his hometown and hopefully restore some stability to the ongoing relationship with his wife, Evangeline.

On discovering that his friends either a)thought he had died or b)was responsible for killing his aunt, he almost takes on a ghostly persona becoming more real as he reconnects with his childhood friends, one of whom is now a ghost hunter, and another, Cherri, who is married to a man she chose in Aaron’s absence.

The echoes of first love and missed opportunities are painfully realised as Aaron and Cherri dance around each other, one wanting an escape and the other a chance to heal.

And in the midst of this, Aaron is haunted-not only by the loss of his son, his fractured marriage and his tumultuous childhood, but also by a boy who is terrorising his attempts to rebuild Holbrook House.

Graffiti which appears and disappears, the mention of his son’s name, inexplicably, on the side of his car, piles of feathers, bloody handprints in the shape of bird wings on the window, and , worst of all, corpses of birds randomly appearing.

Is this a manifestation of guilt or the blood soaked tendrils of his family’s past reaching out to claim another soul?

And if so, is he beyond both redemption and saving in this world?

I was unsure where the story was going for a lot of the novel, torn between grim fascination with the escalating hauntings and the sheer magnitude of Aaron’s grief which made you feel like a voyeur. Ania Ahlborn knows the intricacies of the human heart and pours it onto the page in a way which feels emotionally vulnerable and yet never exploitative.

Birds are well known symbols from classical history as psychopomps, there to escort the dead to the lands beyond and the motif has rarely been so effectively used, in my humble opinion, since Stephen King’s ‘The Dark Half’.

I consider myself to be a bit of a fan of Ania’s and the onyl trouble I have now is deciding which novel of hers to read next.

She is a powerful force in the realm’s of horror fiction written by women.

About the author…

Born in Ciechanow Poland, Ania has always been drawn to the darker, mysterious, and sometimes morbid sides of life. Her earliest childhood memory is of crawling through a hole in the chain link fence that separated her family home from the large wooded cemetery next door. She’d spend hours among the headstones, breaking up bouquets of silk flowers so that everyone had their equal share.

Author of nine novels, Ania’s books have been lauded by the likes of Publisher’s Weekly, The New York Daily News, and The New York Times. Some titles have been optioned for film.

Hailing from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Ania currently lives in Greenville, South Carolina.

Links-http://www.aniaahlborn.com/

Twitter @aniaahlborn @AudibleUK