A review by sydnapped
Afraid by Jack Kilborn

4.0

Full blown, all-out, balls-to-the-wall terror!

There were many, many times throughout reading this suspense story that my mouth dropped open in horror, surprise, or simply in some cathartic attempt to produce a sound that would somehow interpret and reconcile with the appalling and roller-coaster feeling of my whole inner being.

AFRAID is so downright guilelessly gripping and fast-paced that I read it in ONE sitting, and literally on the edge of my seat, not getting up even once!

There were NO boring parts, and in fact the story barely gave breaks to catch breaths; I just needed to keep turning those pages in the hopes of bringing the tension to an end, and boy, was there tension.

Page after page of unnerving, relentless suspense and with every paragraph passed, I wasn't sure how much more I could take.

Or in other words, I was AFRAID.

Another reviewer phrased it as "I got sucked in on the first page and didn’t come up for air until the end." - That about sums it up perfectly.

The bad guys in this book are very, very, very bad guys, and they do some really, really, really bad things.

So what is it about? Well, all you really need to know for now is that it starts with a helicopter carrying a secret Red-Ops team of super soldiers (government weapons) trained in psychological terror that crashes into a wooded area in Northern Wisconsin and unleashes those sick and twisted human monsters on a small, unknowing town to have their way with them.

As other reviewers have mentioned, probably hundreds of times, this story contains a deluge of brutality and gore.

Violence and blood flow liberally, and NOBODY is safe.

While I don't exactly seek out books in the gore-fest genre, I am willing to read stories of substance and enigma. Although there is a lot of torture and slaughter of the very unfortunate residents in "Safe Haven", the story is also a thriller from the very first page that makes it hard to put down.

I love themes of fighting evil, but there's nothing at all supernatural happening in these pages; this time the monsters here are simply horrifying humans that Safe Haven locals must try to outwit and defeat.

If you think you can handle the gore, I do recommend this read, because horror aspects aside, there is really a great mystery to what is going on so much that this story comes off as cinematic in your head.

And as might reasonably be expected when feeling concern for characters in a story, especially one filled with so much anticipation and non-stop thrills, I probably did utter a lot of unintelligible, apprehensive noises while I read it.

AFRAID is a fun, horrific and original novel that is equal parts gruesome and intrigue, but when you pick it up to read it, you damn well better be strapped in for the shit that is about to go down.

One thing I can promise, you will want to make sure all the doors in your home are locked.