The Dead Of Winter

This week I sort of read The Dead Of Winter by Chris Priestley. By sort of I mean that I didn’t technically finish the hole book, I couldn’t actually finish the book. You see I read before I go to sleep so that’s around eleven o’clock, but this book was a Gothic horror so it was quite scary. I’m terrible when it comes to horror movies. This is the first horror novel I’ve come across so far. I usually read books that have a bit of comedy in them but this book was not one bit funny.

This book is about a boy called Michael Vyner who recalls a terrible story, one that happened to him. Michael’s parents are dead, his mother by an illness and his father in the war sacrificing himself to save a friend. After his mother’s funeral he goes to stay with the kindly lawyer, executor of his parents’ will… Until he is invited to spend Christmas with his guardian in a large and desolate country house. When he arrives he sees something not quite right when he sees a woman in the mists who mysteriously disappears. But little can prepare him for the solitude of the house itself as he is kept from his guardian and finds himself spending the Christmas holiday wandering the silent corridors of the house seeking distraction. But lonely doesn't mean alone, as Michael soon realises that the house and its grounds harbour many secrets, dead and alive, and Michael is set the task of unravelling some of the darkest secrets of all.

When ever I read the book I got scared, the details where so exact, so it was like when I looked my eyes I could see what was happening. I get extremely scared at horror movies and so I thought that by reading a horror novel it wouldn’t be so scary but I was wrong, it was even more scary. I have to say though it was a good book from what I read.

If you’re a fan of horror but don’t like visual gore and sickening descriptions, The Dead Of Winter might just be the book for you. Chris has done an amazing job on this book. This is a nail-biting story of haunting and terror by the master of the genre, Chris Priestley.