Muriel McAuley has lived in the Scottish fishing village of Witchaven all her life. She was born there, and she intends to die there.
But when an overseas property developer threatens to evict the residents from their homes and raze Witchaven to the ground in the name of progress, all seems lost . . . until the day a mysterious fog bank creeps inland.

THE HAAR

To some it brings redemption . . . to others, it brings only madness and death. What macabre secrets lie within . . .

I enjoyed the first half of this. It was silly and gory but I liked the way it took a contemporary setting, a Scottish fishing village, and a modern theme, an American billionaire muscling the locals out of the way to build a golf course, and added an ancient sea monster (it prefers the term sea creature. Sea monster suggests it’s evil. It doesn’t see itself that way. Just because it eats people doesn’t make it bad.) The situation felt real. The violence was graphic and bloody, even when the sea monster creature wasn’t involved. 

I liked the originality of the seamonster. It was unexpected, largely unexplained and fundamentally alien. 

I found myself being carried forward by the hope that the billionaire and his minions were headed for a violent death.

I lost interest by the time I was three-quarters of the way through. It had become the kind of horror novel that bores me. The plot was an excuse for sewing together a series of gory kills by the seamonster that reminded me of the sexploitation movies of the 60s and 70s, only with 4K CGI-enhanced gore. By the time I’d read the third kill scene, I was reaching for the FastForward button.

I’d liked the idea of an old woman standing her ground against an obnoxious American Billionaire (apologies for the tautology), but it lost its edge because the bad guys became cartoon villains and the old woman became a plot device rather than a person. I didn’t believe in her. She had no depth. Even her memories were romanticised clichés. It didn’t help that the prose was bland, except when describing the seamonster’s kills.

I was ninety minutes from the end of the novel. Our heroine was face-to-face with the billionaire and his entourage. All seemed to be lost. Even so, I was fairly sure the billionaire, his son and their minions were about to meet a well-deserved, graphically described, gory death, although I didn’t know how.

It should have been a tense moment, leading up to a spectacular and undoubtably blood-soaked finale, yet I was mentally tapping my feet, waiting for them to get on with it. It dawned on me that I was bored, I didn’t care what happened to our heroine or the billionaire, and I wouldn’t care AFTER I finished the book either. So I set it aside. It’s just not my kind of horror novel.