The Hunting Season

Rating:
Summary: Light quick summer horror read
Review: From dj flap:

A house in the country... it's everyone's dream. Yet when the next-door neighbor is miles away, there is nothing more terrifying thatn knowing you are alone and that someone- or something- is out there watching, waiting for the right moment to strike.

April Benard it a young anthropologist at Columbia University. Her husband, Marshall, is a hard driving Wall Street attorney. They are the perfect couple with two children. All they need to complete the picture is a country retreat where they can escape from the stifling- hot Manhattan summers. They find it in a picturesque farm in an isolated New York community called Mad River Mountain.

But there is a strange clan of people up in the woods. "Kin of kin, next of kin, and double kin" is how the townsfolk describe the shadowy , grotesque "pumpkin heads' living deep in the forest not far from the Benard's farmhouse.

April finds them strangely fascinating, but her husband dreads them. The Benard children , watching them flit about the margins of the woods from the bedroom windows, think they are like funny creatures from a fariy tale.

As summer draws to a close, and the rich New Yorkers return to the safe enclaves in the city, the Benards stay behind. But there is a deadly secret that has been hidden away for over a century on Mad River Mountain, and the hills come alive with the sound of chainsaws.And scurrying footsteps, And screams.

Tourist season is over. The hunting season has begun.

Rating:
Summary: OK! Been Done Better
Review: This book is the third book I've read by John Coyne and I'm sorry to say I was not impressed. This book starts off great building slowly and creating an ominous atmosphere...creepy! but by the time I got to the middle of the book I started to get angry, instead of enjoying myself I spent more time critiquing where the story was going and how events were being executed. John Coyne is not a bad writer he just can't hold my interest for an entire novel. This idea has been done before but more successfully, Jack Ketchum's book 'Offseason' which is about a group of young people who visit a friend in Maine, who rent a summer house in the woods. Unbeknownst to them their is a wild inbred family that hunts humans for food and they're watching the house!, what follows is the most savage, harrowing, gut wrentching, ultra violent, goriest fight for survival story that has ever been written and it was so controversial when first released in 1981 that it nearly destroyed this writers career. Offseason is the scariest book I've ever read, it's so brutally realistic and horrific it's beyond your wildest imagination. Unfortunately The Hunting Season is none of the above, it's a mild lukewarm version(with a few good scares)for people with a delicate constitution.

Rating:
Summary: Don't start this book at bedtime...
Review: YOU DON'T GO ALONE INTO MAD RIVER MOUNTAIN... Everything would be okay in the country, thought April Bernard, in her new summer home.Here her children would be happy and safe, and she could spend time with the man who had saved her life and given her love. Here she could further her career by researching a clan of remote inbred hill people, living in their own isolated world. She had nothing to fear in Mad River Mountain... Nothing that is until the creatures she was studying strayed from the dark woods.Horrible beings with stunted bodies, pumpkin faces, deformed in flesh with a thirst for hot blood. Tourist season is over, hunting season has begun...~AN INCREDIBLY ORIGINAL AND TERRIFYING BOOK~BE PREPARED TO LOOSE SOME SLEEP OVER THIS ONE!