#WinterChills ‘Kill Creek’ by Scott Thomas

About the book…

At the end of a dark prairie road, nearly forgotten in the Kansas countryside, is the Finch House. For years it has remained empty, overgrown, abandoned. Soon the door will be opened for the first time in decades. But something is waiting, lurking in the shadows, anxious to meet its new guests…

When best-selling horror author Sam McGarver is invited to spend Halloween night in one of the country’s most infamous haunted houses, he reluctantly agrees. At least he won’t be alone; joining him are three other masters of the macabre, writers who have helped shape modern horror.

But what begins as a simple publicity stunt will become a fight for survival. The entity they have awakened will follow them, torment them, threatening to make them a part of the bloody legacy of ‘Kill Creek’

It’s rare that a book keeps me on edge and has me abandoning my side books -shhh,don’t tell them I read more than 1 book at a time!-but Kill Creek is that rare exception.

I took it everywhere with me, decorated it with all the post it notes and couldn’t put it down. Imagine a cross between The Haunting Of Hill House, The Shining and a reality show and you are a little way to understanding the concept of this truly haunting horror novel.

Over 4 seperate parts which I refer to as the set-up, the stay, the aftermath and then return, 4 authors attend an an online, recorded interview at the allegedly haunted Finch house at Kill Creek.

Laden with misery and mystery, since its inception only 5 owners have stayed more than one night at the house. Since 1975, 2 sisters, Rachel and Rebecca Finch have lived there until their deaths, and since 1998, the house has fallen into disrepair.

Here , a podcast and internet celebrity host named Wainright, has invited 4 of the biggest names in horror to go to the house, stay the night and answer all his questions.

The writers-Sam , Sebastian Cole, T.C Moore and the fabulously named Daniel Slaughter-have their own personal reasons for going, but although they write about the things that hide in the shadows, are they able to face what truly scares them?

Each writer in turn is introduced following a brief trip through the history of Kill Creek, and once the stage is set, the action really begins .

What is so interesting, and so scary about this trip into the minds of 4 very different creatives, is the way that you have  a glimpse into the process of how, and why, they want to write scary fiction, whilst being the principle antagonists of a nightmarish scenario than no one can quite believe is happening.

Belief systems are shaken, secrets are revealed and surrounding them all like the most evil moats, is the house which has a character and agenda all of its own.

It works on a meta level, a story within a story that sucks you in and is entirely unpredictable. What is the motivation of the filmmaker? What is he hoping to capture? And is the re-inflation of  the writer’s egos really worth the price of stripping themselves bare in the public eye?

I don’t believe any of them truly thought it was more than an extended publicity stunt to catapult their back list into the best seller lists, once more, yet none of them, not Wainwright or his partner, camera person Katie, really considered that they would be the catalyst of a truly terrifying haunting.

The night they spend in the house is genuinely scary, but what they take away with them is on a whole new level…

There is the solitary female writer, T.C Moore, who has a point to make in a male heavy industry, Daniel Slaughter, who writes Goosebump-esque novels for teens with a Christian bent, Sebastian Cole, the king of horror fiction who has disappeared from the public eye and Sam McGarver, a writer who now teaches, suffering from a writer’s block and , indeed a life block, that has resulted in the implosion of his marriage.

Added in internet wunderkind Wainwright, a white man, with his black partner, in all aspects of the word, coming to a house which was built by a white man whose black wife was killed by local racists (the Kill Creek house is very much in the Confederate part of the U.S….) and you have a tinderbox which is about to be ignited by thwarted hopes, bad dreams and buried revelations.

What happens to bring them back is something I won’t spoil, but I absolutely loved the juxtaposition of real versus fake horror and how writing the things that keep you awake through the small hours of the night, becomes nothing in the pale daylight where real people live, and die.

It lingers, the idea of a haunting being real because it is a haunting or because you believe it is haunted. What comes first, the ghost or the ghost story?

Read Kill Creek and try to unpack whether the ghost comes first….and let me know!
I am still turning it over more than a week after finishing!

About the author…

Scott Thomas is the Stoker-nominated author of Kill Creek, which was selected by the American Library Association’s reader committee as the top horror book of 2017.

Originally from Coffeyville, Kansas, Scott attended the University of Kansas where he earned degrees in English and Film.

He has written TV movies and teleplays for various networks including Netflix, Syfy, MTV, VH1, the CW, Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, and ABC family. Scott was nominated for a Daytime Emmy for his work on R.L. Stein’s The Haunting Hour.

He lives in Sherman Oaks, California with his wife and two daughters. ‘Violet’ is his second novel

Links-https://www.inkshares.com/scott-thomas