Harrow Lake ~ Kat Ellis

Expected UK Publication Date: 9th July 2020

Harrow Lake is something I picked up purely for how it looked. The proof of this book came in a cardboard sleeve that looks like the sleeve from an old VHS horror movie. The blurb on the back is even written to sound like the blurb of a cult classic. Then, when you take the book out of the sleeve, it is designed to look like a VHS tape, front and back. I will honestly say that this is the most intriguing-looking book I have ever read.

Harrow Lake is a small town stuck in the past with its own monster mythology. Mister Jitters was a recluse that got trapped underground during a landslide and survived by feeding off the dead. Now he’s back for revenge. To make things even creepier, a cult horror movie was filmed in the town and was surrounded by mysterious disappearances. Twenty years after the movie, the director’s daughter goes to Harrow Lake and gets caught up in the horror.

When you open the novel, you start with an interview with the director of Nightjar, Nolan Nox. This interview has been taped and often skips and this is wonderfully shown by recreating the lines that appear on the television screen when a VHS tape skips. The interview isn’t very long, only a few pages, but I had quite a bit of fun trying to read through the obscured parts. I didn’t manage to learn much by doing that.

Normally, I don’t read much in the way of horror, but even though the puppet of Mister Jitters on the front creeped me out a little, I really enjoyed this book. All the elements of a stereotypical cult horror classic are there, but they didn’t feel like cheesy overused tropes. To me, it felt more like a mystery thriller than a horror, but that might be because I really wanted to know what happened to Lola’s mum. 

Lola Nox is a bit of strange character. I’ve not read anything quite like her and I was honestly expected to not like her strange quirks, but they grew on me really quickly. I liked how she buried her secrets, quite literally, by writing things down and hiding them away. From the moment we meet Lola and her quirks, we know we can’t trust her recollection of events. It adds to the horror.

There is a lot of foreshadowing in the book but it’s really subtle and I quite enjoyed the ‘oh that makes sense’ moments. For a genre I don’t usually read, I really enjoyed this book and once I got into it, I couldn’t put it down. For me, this was a four-point-five star read and comes out on the 9th July 2020 in the UK.

C🌙