The Ravening

I didn't love this one quite as much as I did Daniel Church's previous book (or indeed some of the books published under the author's real name). The ensemble horror of The Hollows is replaced by a much tighter focus on just one character, and Church does a good job of getting into her head and explicating her past trauma, her fearfulness and resilience, and the walls she needs to break down. She's a compelling character, and her supernatural antagonist is a memorable creation, one that you can almost smell off the page. It's the human bad guys that let me down a little bit, as I just didn't believe that their schemes, especially the first one, could ever work - when it was outlined, my reaction was, oh come on, and what about..... The suspension of disbelief was wobbling. Yes, I was completely on board with an ancient evil that's twenty feet high and made of bones, but a villainous toff was just pushing it too far for me. Go figure.