Every hundred years the gateway opens between this world and ours.
The hunt is on. No one is safe.
The Shadowing is coming…
Callum Scott can see ghosts, it is not something that he talks about, but lately he has been seeing them everywhere. It is not just ghosts, there is also the massive black dog that lurks in the woods near his grandmothers house and the bad dreams, warning him of something coming, something evil.
Callum is a chime child, he lives alone with his grandmother outside the town in a small cottage in the woods, a loner by preference he is nonetheless a good rugby-player and well-liked at his school, but becomes a target of the local bullies after a flash of precognition ruins their plans for one of his classmates. Add to this the brutal murders of chime children across the country, the monstrous dog and its master lurking in the woods, a demon that is wearing his face and Callum’s life expectancy starts to look a bit limited, but he is not alone, his school-friend Melissa has an interest in the supernatural and the two of them begin to try to find out why he can see the things he can see.
I started reading The Shadowing: Hunted with music playing in the background as I like a bit of background noise when I am reading. I had just started reading chapter two when Creeping Death
by Metallica started playing – I don’t usually compile a sound-track for books I read, but this track would be the theme-song for this book! Adam captures teenagers incredibly well and the tone and timing of the horror is superb! His descriptions of the attacks is incredibly bloody but never becomes gratuitous and the sense of disquiet that grows throughout the book is brilliant!
I love horror and am not ashamed to say that I am a fan of gore! Hunted fed my hunger for monsters and the macabre but left me wanting more and going by the preview of Skinned I will not be disappointed!
Chime Children are an accepted part of British folklore too!
Chime hours were commonly accepted to be three, six, nine, or twelve o’clock. In the old monastic tradition these were the hours of required prayer and were frequently marked by church bells chiming the hour. In some locales, however, particularly in Somerset and East Anglia, the hours were recognized as eight o’clock in the evening, midnight, and four o’clock in the morning. A chime child is anyone who was born exactly on one of the accepted chime hours, although there was quite a bit of variance in that as well; some locales recognized those born within that hour and some recognized only the night-time hours of nine o’clock, midnight, and three and six o’clock in the morning. Some other traditions even limited the hours to specifically those who were born between midnight and dawn, Friday to Saturday.