Real estate agent Anthony Graham has his family on the run after witnessing a murder at the hands of the powerful Costello crime family.
They’re forced to hide at one of Anthony’s properties: a deserted campground with a sinister past.
No one is safe from the men that hunt them or the terrors that await them inside The Devil’s Nest.
I didn’t mind this novel, and it did have some good creeps, however, for me, there were a couple of things that lessened my enjoyment of the entire novel.
The first is, it felt, at times, as though the novel wasn’t sure if it was an “on the run from a mob boss with the standard violent end” novel, or a “set up a situation where a family ends up on haunted property and let the horrors begin” novel.
To Durgin’s credit, it didn’t take him long to get the family to the titular Devil’s Nest, and we started getting a taste of the horror fairly soon. And I must say, the horror elements were handled very well.
But…this also leads to my second point, and it’s strictly a personal preference, personal enjoyment results may vary…but I’m not a fan of “crazed supernatural cult leader” angle at all. Honestly, had I got a sense of that from the back cover blurb, I likely would not have picked it up.
Again, though, if we set that aspect (and my personal preference) aside, I will say that Durgin did a good job of mixing the disparate storylines into a cohesive whole, turning this novel into a mashup of Goodfellas and The Shining by way of Swamp Thing.
Likely similar to every reader who is also an author (and likely lots of readers who aren’t authors), I usually get invested in a novel and then my mind starts looking forward, extrapolating the plot points to where I think this ride will end up. Sometimes I’m right—yay!—and very often I’m wrong, because the author surprised the heck out of me and gave me an ending better than I could have expected—yay!—and then there’s times where the ending isn’t what I expected, and I wonder why it didn’t go the way I expected it to. In those cases, I’ll usually respect the author’s decision, but I’ll also feel a little cheated.
Without spoiling anything, I’ll say the ending to this one went that third way. There was an obvious—and very satisfying (again, to my mind) ending that could have come out of the mob boss/cult leader plot threads that just didn’t coalesce, and I’m kinda bummed it didn’t.
But I can’t fault the novel for that, that’s all my subjectivity coming to the fore. So, in the end, I’ll say if the Goodfellas and The Shining by way of Swamp Thing thing is up your alley, you’re gonna dig this.
