Okay, so not The Taking quite yet...  I was listening an audiobook at work and actually finished it today.  You get Scowler right now and Derting's book tomorrow or Sunday...

What to say about Scowler…  It’s definitely a five star audiobook.  But I won’t recommend it to anyone ever, probably.  I have a hard time recommending… difficult… books.  I’d have to be very sure that someone wanted to read this type of story.

The other thing is that I don’t know how some of this works on the printed page.  The reader was just so good and some of the noises he made…  I really wonder what they looked like on the page.  Could they have been half so chilling?

So anyway, I was completely shocked at the plot because the person who recommended it to me focused on their being a fantastic villain that shows up in a meteor shower…  So I kind of assumed he was an alien or something.  Nope, this is so much worse.  This is real-life stuff – and that’s a kind of horror I usually avoid.  I don’t want to read about disturbing, terrible things that could be happening next door…

There are no aliens at all in this book.  There is a hint that there could be something supernatural, but it seems much more likely that it is psychological.  Basically, a family is terrorized by an abusive father, he gets sent to prison, everyone gets older…  And then he escapes during a meteor shower and comes home to threaten everyone. 

The twist (not a spoiler, as it’s mentioned on the back cover) is that the main character called upon his imaginary friends to help him survive and may have to again.  One of those friends is...  truly horrifying.

Each member of the family is a fully complete character.  I feel like I know them well and so every peril, every tragedy…  It hits hard.  There are parts of the book that made me squirm uncomfortably.  There are parts that made my skin crawl and my legs tingle.  My heart raced.  My stomach sunk.  I was shocked, I was horrified, I was struck by hope…  And shocked again. 

Maybe this audiobook was just too intense for me, hah.