I would like to thank Ad Astra and Head of Zeus for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Head of Zeus

Published – Out Now

Price – £20 hardback £5.03 Kindle eBook

YOU MAY HAVE ESCAPED... BUT YOU'LL NEVER BE FREE.

After her terrifying experience at the hands of the Watchers, Mina has escaped to a cottage on the west coast of Ireland. She obsessively researches her former captors, desperate to find any way to prolong the safety of humankind.

When Mina encounters a stranger near her home, she fears the worst - for she knows the figure is not what it seems. Soon, people she has encountered start to disappear.

Mina knows the Watchers' power is growing. She flees for her life, but when she reports her fears she finds her sanity questioned. Can she convince people that the Watchers are real, and ready to strike - or will she suffer the fate she has dreaded since she first encountered those malevolent beings?

Warning – Stay In The Light is the sequel to The Watchers by A M Shine and there will be spoilers. Its excellent and well worth your time.

The sequel to a horror story can be a disappointment sometimes. So often it’s the same plot but with new people just doing the same things with the same monster and the same outcomes. A good sequel needs to be brave enough to try something else. Find something in the original story that you can expand on and play against. AM Shine in Stay In The Light I feel has taken the latter option and really delivered a different type of disuniting story finding appropriately more buried within the original tale and now unleashes this on the reader to create a new horror tale to unsettle us on a dark night.

To recap in Ireland Mina is dealing with being entrapped in an apparently endless wood and surviving by staying within a concrete coop. Being a prisoner to a group of creatures known as the Watchers. Who very night come alive and feasts on the unwary. Mina and Ciara were though the only two t survive in many ways to an elderly woman known as Madeline whose resourcefulness and intelligence pulled them along and yet was ultimately revealed to be a watcher too. Now Mina aware watchers are out in the rest of the world hiding in plain sight has run to the coast, trying desperately to forget. She is though soon disturbed by hearing that Sean Kilamartin the son of the professor who built the coop and knew the legends of the watchers is now digging in a remote mountainous area. The watchers seem very interested in this and are even now looking for Mina who knows too much.

I really appreciate that Shine didn’t decide to go for another catastrophic pressure cooker of a story (however good they are at writing them). Instead Shone has cleverly taken the watchers and mixed in Irish myth and folklore. The concept of changelings – those inhuman creatures who replaced people and the idea of fairies (not the Disney kind) but more almost an elf-like equivalent but here something far more monstrous. What tends to be more the domain of fantasy is here given a thrilling horror twist and yes here fairies become scary.

What we have are two plot strands and both delivered really well. With Mina and Ciara the first third of the book is actually doing that rare thing of exploring consequences of a past adventure. The Mina we have here is broken, fractured and has cut herself off in a little cottage (yes with the parrot) and is a borderline alcoholic. Its distressing for us as readers as we found Mina such a strong character but the deaths and torment she saw had a price and it rings rue that she has seen something no one will believe her about. Ciara is apparently doing better as she rings every night but Shone pulls back the curtain to show another fractured soul. We get to spend time with them in the first third and while this slows the pace down, we are actually invested again in their stories and as nastier things start to happen we want to see them start to step back.

The newer angle is the story of Sean Kilmartin and the dig. In many ways here Shine is using the classic archaeological horror setting but it is told really well. Lots of build-up of strange noises, smells, and a fractured group getting very tense with each other.  It also allows the wider Irish legends to be cited and we as the reader knowing a little more get to put the pieces together as to what the watchers actually are. Sean is a fascinating catalyst of a character in some ways a victim too. His father’s obsession has driven him to prove that his father was right. But at the same time Sean carries a huge sense of entitlement. He doesn’t have the same academic knowledge he uses other people; he ha a proprietary desire to fall for his more intelligent colleague Ssh who is central to the solving of the dig’s mystery and as the story ramps up his selfishness is often leading him to horrific decisions. I find him unlikeable but compelling and you can understand how he became like this which really is great character work.

The claustrophobia of the previous story is here replaced with the use of the classic conspiracy theories of creatures hidden among us replacing us. Who can we trust? Are the people we know still the same. For Mina that puts her into seeming as someone insane and it allows us to wonder with every new character who are they really? That sense of paranoia really gives an edge to the story. Then in the latter half we see the Watchers are not monsters in the sense of mindless creatures. They have purpose, an agenda built from their history with humans, they see us as prey and they are indeed cunning and when they have you it gets violent and gory fast. As you read along though you wonder how this story is going to end and indeed while it has a big climax of disaster the strong feeling is this book really is setting up another tale and I suspect again a different (even bigger) type of story is going to be told – I am there for that.

Stay in the Light uses the original tale to create rich background and grows outward into a much bigger tale of myth, horror and disaster. I really enjoyed again Shine’s storytelling ability its lyrical and intimate delivering us characters that we get to know warts and all and then throws them into a world of horror for good measure to see what it creates. Fans of the Watchers of which there are many should be very rewarded, and I suspect we will once again hear more in the future too. A great unsettling tale for a cold dark night. Highly recommended!