by Whoa! I just finished this one. For the last quarter of the story I felt like I was caught underneath a freight train going one hundred miles an hour! My mouth was so dry I needed to get a drink, but I couldn’t put the book down. I had goosebumps, and I needed a sweater—but I couldn’t stop reading. The ending was that intense! Whew.
Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner opens with a young woman, Lori, being called to task in the Oakmont grocery by a strange goat-eyed old woman who tells her she must confess and atone, or both Lori and everyone she loves will suffer.
Lori doesn’t know what she did wrong–much like when we get that worm in our conscience, that feeling of guilt, and we can’t put our finger on what we’ve done–that was poor Lori—or was it: Had she buried the memory of her awful deed so deep in her mind that she didn’t remember it?
That night Lori wakes to someone, or some Thing, in her apartment. Scary, yeah – and it only gets worse and weirder. And more violent. Although there was both violence and gore, I felt it was handled well; I didn’t feel it was gratuitous or ‘in your face.’
As we draw closer to unraveling the mystery of Lori’s dark deed, Tim Waggoner weaves excellent characters into a layered, macabre world that becomes vividly cinematic as a variety of supernatural beings, including swift shadows that race through Oakmont, leaving grisly deaths behind.
Bring on the sequel!
Thanks to FlameTreePress, #NetGalley, and the author of #YourTurntoSuffer for the ARC in exchange for my honest feedback, this is it!
If you open the page, you will see what the old woman’s ‘goat eyes’ looked like.