Today it's my turn on the BlogTour Boy in the Box by Marc E. Fitch.
Marc E. Fitch is the author of the novels Old Boone Blood, Paradise Burns and Dirty Water,as well as the books Paranormal Nation: Why America Needs Ghosts, UFOs and Bigfoot and Shmexperts: How Power Politics and Ideology are Disguised as Science. His short fiction has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year vol 10.
Marc received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Western Connecticut State University and has worked as a bartender, psychiatric technician for inpatient behavioral health hospitals, and most recently as an investigative reporter for a public-policy organization. He was the recipient of the 2014
Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship and the Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize. He is the father of four children and lives and works in Connecticut.
Ten years ago a mysterious and tragic hunting accident deep in the Adirondack Mountains left a boy buried in a storied piece of land known as Coombs’ Gulch and four friends with a terrible secret.
Now, Jonathan Hollis and brothers Michael and Conner Braddick must return to the place that changed their lives forever in order to keep their secret buried. What they don’t realize is that they are walking into a trap — one set decades earlier by a supernatural being who is not confined by time or place:a demon that demands a sacrifice.
When Gene, Jonathan, Conner and his brother Michael travel up to an isolated cabin in the Adirondack Mountains to celebrate the upcoming nuptials of one of them, the plan is to hunt and spend his last moments of single freedom with his mates and doing manly things without any distractions.
Things don't go exactly as planned and the four of them leave with the kind of secret that burdens the soul and psyche. Killing a child and burying him in the forest isn't really something you can just get over, right? Well, some of them seem to deal with it better than others.
It becomes necessary to return to the forest to remove the clues of their crime, which thrusts the men back into the nightmare that has been following them around for years.
It's a tense horror read that creeps and swirls like a malignant fog.
Fitch lets the more sinister side of this story seep in gradually, as if the demon were playing a game of distraction. Is this a story about a murder, about deviants trying to kidnap children or something more nefarious? The misdirection is actually what makes the story so compelling, because you don't actually put all of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together until the end.
Talking of the end - it throws up this horrific moral dilemma, which gives the book and the reader this last hefty slap of evil. It's an interesting walk on a very fine line between the instability of minds burdened by guilt, the supernatural and a darkness that exists all around us.
Buy Boy in the Box at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher: Flame Tree Press; pub date 23 April 2020. Buy at Amazon com.
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