A standalone horror novel from Kelley Armstrong, Hemlock Island is the story of Laney Kilpatrick who is renting out her (amazingly described) second home. She’s doing this begrudgingly, she got the house in her divorce but the cost of maintaining her isolated island home, plus maintaining the apartment she shares with her niece, well it’s share your space with strangers, or not have the house on Hemlock Island at all. However, some of the people renting out the island home have left some … remnants of their trip there. The action in the novel kicks off when Laney gets a call from the current renters who have found blood in one of the guest rooms …
This is the start of one wild ride. Laney and her niece head out to the island which is super isolated and oh yeah, has no cell or internet service. They want to check out what is going on (and as the story unfolds it becomes clear, that blood in the guest room is not the first creepy thing to have happened on the island, there have been hex circles and petty vandalism, and other strange things left behind) and are joined by some uninvited guests – Laney’s ex-husband, his sister, an ex-friend and her brother. Then their only way off the island is taken from them …
So to recap as the story in this book kicks off you have:
- An isolated setting where creepy things are happening.
- A group of people who have strained personal dynamics.
- Said characters are stuck in this isolated setting.
There is nothing that I don’t love about this kind of setup.
I suspected going in that I was going to enjoy this book, I am a fan of some of the author’s other series, and I am here for a nice stand-alone horror novel. So I got this book almost a year ago (it was gifted to me as a Christmas present) and then it went on my shelf and …. lingered. Whoops. I now regret putting it off for as long as I did. This is a wild ride, and I have to give this book its kudos for actually making me stop and put it down and say “What the [censored] just happened.”
I do want to flag for anyone who is familiar with Kelley Armstrong’s other works that while there is a light dusting of a kind of romance (Laney and her ex Kit have things to work out) romance is not front and center here – horror is. Also, the author writes a fair amount of series work (I’m going to date myself and say that her ‘Women of the Otherworld series was my main introduction to the author and what I default to thinking about when I see her name.) this is very much a standalone horror novel. (And you should know that I love stories that tell their tale and are done).
The plot moves very quickly in this book, and the suspense and growing sense of unease ratchets up. There are some very complicated interpersonal dynamics amongst the group, we have exes, ex-best friends, estranged friends, and a guy that no one seems to like … there are also secrets the group is keeping from each other. One of the secrets seemed obvious to me, but I don’t know if I just made a lucky guess or if it wasn’t that well hidden in the text.
Minor spoiler, there are dead bodies in this book, and some of the remains are described in…great detail. This is a horror book, and some of the descriptions remind the reader of that fact.
The ending didn’t 100% land with me, I liked it! But I didn’t love it. I would overall give this book four stars and would recommend it to fans of horror novels.