Book: The Twilight Pariah by Jeffrey Ford

Published September 2017 by St. Martin’s Press|176 pages

Where I Got It: I own the paperbook

Series: None

Genre: Adult Fiction/Horror

Three friends go looking for treasure and find horror in Jeffrey Ford’s The Twilight Pariah.

All Maggie, Russell, and Henry wanted out of their last college vacation was to get drunk and play archaeologist in an old house in the woods outside of town. When they excavate the mansion’s outhouse they find way more than they bargained for: a sealed bottle filled with a red liquid, along with the bizarre skeleton of a horned child

Disturbing the skeleton throws each of their lives into a living hell. They feel followed wherever they go, their homes are ransacked by unknown intruders, and people they care about are brutally, horribly dismembered. The three friends awakened something, a creature that will stop at nothing to retrieve its child.

The Twilight Pariah was another one from the PageHabit horror box that I’m just now getting to.  This one, like The Murders Of Molly Southbourne, was also okay, and didn’t really work for me.

The Twilight Pariah is your typical story where people disturb a skeleton and get haunted.  Obviously, characters in stories like these don’t know that you don’t disturb skeletons and graveyards, because bad things happen when you do.

It wasn’t as eerie and creepy as I thought it would be and there were times when the book was funny…but unintentionally.  It’s more comedy-horror than true horror or ghost story.  For some reason bizarre reason, Horrorstor is coming to mind, but maybe it’s the sometimes intentionally funny moments, sometimes unintentionally moments that is bringing the two together.

It was definitely too short, and I felt like there could have been more in terms of what was going on, and how disturbing the skeleton really upset the balance of things.  I like the idea behind it, and I could picture everything really well, but it just needed more to it.  It could be an entertaining tv or straight to DVD movie, especially around Halloween.  It’s short enough that it felt rushed and lacking in detail, so it could be interesting if the author decided to expand on it, and write a full-length novel, instead of a novella.

2 stars.  The Twilight Pariah was okay, and not as scary or creepy as I thought it would be.  I wish I had more to say about it, but I don’t.