Nightcrawlers

Nightcrawlers by Tim Curran
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When a bulldozer unearths corpses in a field, it's up to the police to figure out what's going on. Out-of-towner cop Kenney wonders what the rest of the police aren't telling him, what all the townspeople know but are afraid to do anything about: the degenerate subterraneans that lurk in the tunnels beneath the town of Haymarket...

I got this from Netgalley and the fine folks at DarkFuse.

So... I loved this book! It covers a lot of ground that I love in horror books, most notably the secrecy of small towns and degenerate subhuman cannibals... or are they?

Curran took me for a ride. I was all set for the story to go off an on inbred hillbilly serial killer tangent but it went in a completely different, even creepier direction.

The way the story unfolded was well done. After some teaser encounters with the underground dwellers, Kenney reads through the sheriff's file on incidents involving them, leading toward the third act, which was pretty much a dungeon crawl in the labyrinth of tunnels beneath the town.

This was only my second Tim Curran book but it won't be the last. He did a great job in building the suspense, conveying a feeling of claustrophobia, and describing the gore in horrid detail.

As I said before, the story progressed in a direction I didn't expect and the ending was more of that vein. Nightcrawlers held my attention tight the entire time and was the most fun I've had reading a horror novel in ages. Five stars.

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