Ghost Road Blues
By Jonathan Maberry
Maberry is always good for a horror fest with plenty of gore to go with it! It has characters that made me really hate them and others to really love them! A town that has supernatural monsters and flesh and blood monsters!
A crazed supernatural being that took over a body until a brave black blues guitar player finally killed it. Then racists killed him. Now, decades later, it's back with a new host, the racists are still around, and a vicious band of thieves crashed their car in this unlucky town. But the ghost of the blues player is back too, to help even the field a little.
Suspenseful, gory in spots, has child abuse in it, an attempted rape (she was ok), and severe racism with a beating to death. What I am trying to say is that it's not for the faint of heart or disturbed by these things. I would want to know before going into a book. The book was good but I had to keep reminding myself, " this is not real!", as I read the gruesome parts. ( )

Wow! What a spooky and creepy story!

A small backstory:

The town of Pine Deep is just steeped in haunting lore of the Bone Man as something tragic happened thirty years before in Pine Deep. Now every year the town has a haunted hayride festival that commemorates the lore. Though this year something comes barreling through the small town in the way of three criminals and they are notorious for crimes they have committed in the past. Things are about to get interesting when the criminals show up as the haunting in the town slowly comes to life encompassing them all.

Thoughts:

There are quite a few characters to keep track of in this story so I didn't go into any great detail of each one of them - it was best to give a background on the story itself instead of going into character detail. Main characters that stand out in this story are: Terry Wolfe, Malcolm Crow, Valerie Guthrie (Crow's girlfriend), Iron Mike Sweeney, Tow Truck Eddie, and Vic Wingate, plus the criminals: Ruger, Boyd, and Tony.

The story itself seems slow at first and I did notice that there is up and down ratings/reviews on this book, but though it might seem to be a slow burn the book literally takes off about the half way point and when the criminals show up the story escalates. It almost seems to have a brooding terror just below the surface of the story as you can feel that something is going to be happening but you just do not know what is coming toward you.

SPOILER ALERT!!

Normally I do not put spoiler alerts in my reviews as I like to keep readers guessing but in this case I felt it was necessary as there is a twist that happens near the end that had me read the section twice to make sure my brain was computing the information.

So here are my spoiler thoughts:

There is a twist near the end of the book that surrounds the Bone Man as I had been thinking the Bone Man was the one actually haunting the town of Pine Deep but I learned from the twist that though he is haunting the town there is another entity/ghost haunting the town as well but I don't learn this tidbit till much later in the story. Actually I don't learn it till close to the end which actually I can see why there is more to the town of Pine Deep and that I am going to have to continue on here shortly with book number 2 to find out what happens.

So those are my thoughts on that interesting musing and now to the rest of my review. :)

This was my first time reading this author and I am so happy that I finally stepped into his books. This is the first book in a trilogy and I am looking forward to reading the next book which is "Dead Man's Song". Giving this one five "Bone Man Boo" stars!

For more thoughts on this review, please see my blog:
https://booknookretreat.blogspot.com/2021/08/ghost-road-blues-pine-deep-1-by.htm... ( )

Excellent novel in the King/McCammon horror camp. Seemingly disparate multiple threads are nicely woven together eventually to bring the book to a "conclusion." Oops, sorry it is a dreaded series (Pine Deep) book and there are two more novels after this, so what I thought was a nice compact little novel, isn't and nothing except the body count is resolved and even that isn't certain. Well anyway, this one was good as long as you don't care what happens next.

The problem is I think this is going to devolve into another [b:It|18342|It (pennywise)|Stephen King|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1309376909s/18342.jpg|150259]. There is seemingly no way that as many elegant strands can be interwoven like there was in this first novel. There are signs already in Ghost Road that it is going to develop into another "ancient evil" in Pine Deep (or Derry, or Oxrun Station, or etc.) I guess I should maybe have a more open mind. I have started the second in the series, [b:Dead Man's Song|215606|Dead Man's Song (Pine Deep, #2)|Jonathan Maberry|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1388231802s/215606.jpg|208735] but I'm not optimistic so far.

This is an addenda after reading all three volumes. Don't waste your time, unless... GRB is by far the best and most innovative book in the Pine Deep trilogy and can be enjoyed on its own. I would say this saga goes somewhat downhill, more of a gentle decline, into the formulaic "curse plagued town monster fest" sub-genre as the trilogy unwinds. If you are into that gig, well get this rig because that's what we have here and a good one it is. I'm not that into the supernatural thriller sub-genre so the subsequent two books in the series lost at least half a star for that. ( )

I managed my expectations pretty well for reading this one. I wanted regular horror and got it. It's October, after all, and isn't this the season to enjoy a run of scary?

Or is it simply the desire to see evil as plain as day, to root for the underdogs, to gather up all the misfits and see all the jerks and the ultraviolent assholes of the world get their comeuppance?

Maybe a bit of both.

Fortunately, there's a lot of bigger-than-life characters in this small town and the good guys are good pretty much all the way through. The bad, however, are really bad. :) And did I mention a recurring string of gruesome murders in a small town known for it's spectacular Halloween festivals meant to scare your pants off?

Yeah, well, aside from a few great scenes and pretty epic buildup, I'm gonna have to hold my horses to see the grand explosion because this is a trilogy!

That's fine, of course. Sometimes a tale is very long. I just have to wonder what it might have been like to have this as one gigantic tome like the good old days of epic horrors instead of the bite-sizes publishers think we want. *shrug*

So maybe I'll just pretend it's one book. That's the ticket! And people think that readers are without imagination! I'll show them! ( )

Narrated by Tom Weiner (yes, really). A five-star narration, and a very good, compelling, intense, and wild novel.
4 stars, very recommended. ( )