Whisper Down the Lane
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Average rating3.4
“A diabolically creepy hybrid of horror and psychological suspense that thrills as much as it unsettles. You’ll keep turning the pages even as your hands shake.”—Riley Sager, New York Times best-selling author of Home Before Dark A pulse-pounding, true-crime-based horror novel inspired by the McMartin preschool trial and Satanic Panic of the ’80s. Richard doesn’t have a past. For him, there is only the present: a new marriage, a first chance at fatherhood, and a quiet life as an art teacher in Virginia. Then the body of a ritualistically murdered rabbit appears on his school’s playground, along with a birthday card for him. But Richard hasn’t celebrated his birthday since he was known as Sean . . . In the 1980s, Sean was five years old when his mother unwittingly led him to tell a lie about his teacher. When school administrators, cops, and therapists questioned him, he told another. And another. And another. Each was more outlandish than the last—and fueled a moral panic that engulfed the nation and destroyed the lives of everyone around him. Now, thirty years later, someone is here to tell Richard that they know what Sean did. But who would even know that these two are one and the same? Whisper Down the Lane is a tense and compulsively readable exploration of a world primed by paranoia to believe the unbelievable.
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I enjoyed the story. It was a quick, easy and entertaining read. I like the references to other books and movies in the appendix. I didnt particularly like any of the characters or relate to them but the story was written well and researched well.
Whisper Down the Lane by Clay McLeod Chapman is a chilling tale about identity and the power of stories. Taking the American “Satanic Panic” as it's context, Whisper Down the Lane focuses far more on human evils than supernatural ones. This is by no means to say the book doesn't have eerie and creepy moments, because it definitely does. Overall it was really easy listening. I had a lot of fun listening to this story. Despite liking the book overall it does have a few issues. One problem is that the young characters (age 5) seem very advanced for their age. This may be a necessary device for the storytelling purposes, but several members of the HOWL Society book club (who I read this book with) remarked on this aspect of the book seeming unrealistic. Additionally I thought that the second half, and especially final third, seemed a bit “messy.” The protagonist was somewhat unreliable, but even taking this into consideration there were elements of the book that I thought were never fully developed or paid off, and other aspects of the plot that almost seemed contradictory. Yet, overall this was still a great listen with some scary moments! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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