Thanks for the goddamn nightmares

This needs to be a movie. Just when you think it can't get more upsetting, it does. Good lord what a ride. ( )

‘The Forgotten Island’ is a fun throwback to the kind of quick and nasty chiller that Richard Laymon write in the 80s. In fact if it had had a Steve Crisp cover and Californian leads in place of Scots and I might have been convinced I was reading a lost work from Laymon.

The book has a classic B-movie structure – a prologue set in the past where bad shit goes down and lots of people get messed up, followed by a skip forward to the present day and a slow build up to more bad shit going down. In this case the setting is a remote island in Thailand and the bad shit involves hordes of possessed Thai workers and giant creepy spider things.

The protagonist is Ana, a young woman with a troubled past who is on holiday in Thailand with her sister, Rachel, and Rachel’s dick of a boyfriend. Things start going wrong when the sisters wake up on a boat adrift in the ocean after a night of partying. When they end up coming aground on the mysterious island where the shit went down in the prologue it’s pretty obvious they’re going to go even wronger before long.

There’s a lot to enjoy here if you like simple, readable horror. David Sodergren writes gore really well (something that’s not easy to do) and keeps the story moving along at a decent pace. The characters are mostly fun too, from the slightly grumpy Scots to a couple of free living (and loving) hippies. It’s pretty broad brush stuff, and not what you’d call deep, but it works well in a low budget horror movie kind of a way.

There’s some sensitive handling of mental health issues along with the gore, and whilst most of the Thai characters are pretty weak, there is at least one fully rounded one in boat captain Chakrit. The slightly salacious use of sex in the book is a bit less palatable, with lots of leering men and a seemingly ever-present threat of sexual assault for the female characters. It’s something that was common in Laymon’s books, and it felt a bit dated here, but it didn’t intrude too much,

Overall then, this is a slight but entertaining piece of nastiness. It’s fast, ferocious fun, even if it isn’t going to win any awards for originality or depth. ( )

This book follows two sisters, Ana and Rachel Logan, on vacation in Thailand. They are having a wonderful time exploring everything that Thailand has to offer. They see the sights, go to parties, meet guys, and generally live their best lives. They decide to go to a party on the beach near their hotel where they make friends. The next morning, they find themselves and their new friends on a boat drifting in the ocean. None of them can remember how they got there but the boat won’t start. After drifting for a while, they see an island in the distance. It has lush vegetation and sandy beaches and seems to be a real paradise. Spoiler Alert: It is not.

I loved this book. I cannot believe that this is David Sodergren’s debut novel. He did a wonderful job writing characters that were likeable and that I wanted to root for. He also did an equally good job writing terrible, awful characters that I wanted to throat punch. Ana and Rachel’s relationship is deep and nuanced with plenty of backstories to give their interactions meaning. Their dialogue is also very funny. All of the characters had their own time to shine (or stink) and you could tell that Sodergren really took the time to make sure that no one was forgotten.

Once the terror ball starts rolling, there is no shortage of scares and terrifying moments. Sodergren unleashes his island on the reader slowly, and each new revelation leads you closer to an ultimately satisfying and horrifying conclusion. Despite the slow reveal of what is actually happening, this is not a slow read. Sodergren punches his readers in the teeth repeatedly with carefully crafted death scenes and brutal situations. The hits keep coming right until the end. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I already have Sodergren’s next book, Night Shoot, and after finishing this one, I don’t think it will last long on my TBR cart.
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