Review of The Moor

I received this book for free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

The Moor by Sam Haysom
Genres: Horror
Published by Unbound Digital on May 8th, 2018
Pages: 224
Format: eARC
Source: Netgalley

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'There's a delightful bit of sleight-of-hand at the heart of the novel that I particularly enjoyed.' – Owen King, co-author of Sleeping Beauties
It begins with a ghost story around a campfire. Teenagers out on a walking trip, trying to act brave in front of each other.
But as the walk gets underway and the boys begin to fall out, odd things start to happen.
Noises in the night. A severed rabbit’s foot outside someone’s tent.
Soon, the boys begin to disappear.
As panic sets in and a storm approaches, the remaining boys must band together to face a darkness not even the local ghost stories could help them predict.

First Line

This time it’s the rain that gets him.

Here is what I thought

So this one has one of those hoping around the timeline things, plus it is told in the POV of the teenagers. We know at the beginning one of the survivors as it starts with him in 2015, then it goes back to 2002 and the start of the camping trip to Rutmoor.

I feel like I can’t say much without giving away a key point so this is a brief review.

Small group of boys, four of them are friends, though at times I am not sure why. The other boy is the son of the coach that is taking them camping, they are new to the area and so Tim doesn’t have any friends and the four boys are not really his friends but kind of include him.

While at their first night camping around the campfire they start talking about the spooky things that happened in the Moor. Then the man tells them what he has heard around town about the witch and what happened to her. It’s a good scary ghost story for a camping trip till things start going wrong. When they wake up one of the boys is gone. Now he was mad at the others so it was logical to think that maybe he took off ahead of them but when another goes missing it’s a little harder to convince the other boys nothing is wrong.

It has a bit of a nod to Stephen King and was very atmospheric tone and I thought it was pretty face paced as I finished it pretty fast. I thought I had it figured out and I kind of did but I still got a bit of a shock at the reveal. I do think I wish it would have a bit more about the supernatural aspects of this story. I wanted to know a bit more about the what and why of it. I also seen the end coming but felt it was very abrupt. It was like this is what happened, the end. So I was left kind of wondering a bit more about the supernatural part.

That being said I really did enjoy the story and would try something else from this author in the future as it was a decent debut novel.  Anyone else read this? I am curious about what others thought of it. *Hint: Barb read this! :)*

Though I would have liked more about the supernatural elements, I really enjoyed this one! @samhaysom #debutnovel Click To Tweet

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