This one almost lost me at the beginning. There's a fast paced prologue written in present tense and fairly gory, followed by a slow paced first chapter. Add to that a protagonist named Rooster (so I have a mental picture of him as a chicken every time his name is mentioned) and it was only the creepy scarecrows that held me.

Lots of Ak 47's, high testosterone stuff. But then there are increasing hints of horrors to come and things get pretty cryptic. The scarecrows made me wonder if we had some Children of the Corn type Horror in store, but then it took a different turn. Having finished now and assimilated the great reveal, I'm tempted to say this is more of a piece of avant garde art than a story. Objectively, it was very well done. The ideas were above the pale and stimulated a lot of analytical thought.

 

However, as a story, it was non-linear and very confusing at times. First a guy is dead, then he's alive again, then... you get the picture. It all makes sense in the end, but that feeling of not knowing what's going on along the way isn't what I look for in a story. It would probably appeal to Tarantino film fans. Personally, I'm hoping the next story I read is a little more straight forward with the old fashioned beginning, middle and end formula.

The scarecrows! Naturally creepy. I like it.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

6year old Cathy is thought to be responsible for the murder and mutilation of a classmate and is institutionalised for her supposed crimes. Her stories of murderous scarecrows roaming the cornfields at night only make her seem more delusional.

When a new doctor takes over her case, he believes that Cathy is telling the truth and that she is not responsible for the murder. As the story shifts between different timelines we are shown what happened on that night and who or what was responsible.

 

This was fairly enjoyable, the 2nd half of the story being far more engaging and having a much better flow to it. The first half felt quite jarring to read and it took until nearly halfway through to get used to the different timeline use. The main characters were fleshed out well enough for a novella but some characters were redundant and didn't end up adding anything to the story. One such character was a female doctor who started off believing Cathys story, was turned into a more villainous character and then disappeared altogether.

 

I have to wonder after finishing this whether there was any real need for the scarecrow element as the psychological horror would have been enough for a great story. Trimming the characters and focusing more on the core murder story would have made this a much tighter read. 

 

Overall this was a decent read by an author who I would certainly pick up more work from, the ideas were good but the execution needs to be worked on.

Ever since I managed to catch the hard-to-find and low-budget Scarecrows on video in the late '80s, I've had a bit of fascination with tales concerning this genuinely creepy type of creature. So when new-to-me author Christine Hayton's first first foray into horror popped up on Netgalley, I was all for learning whether she could generate the same kind of chills I still fondly remember from that time when video stores still ruled the world.

First, the good. Hayton skillfully weaves between different timelines as she teases out some information in the present day ("present" in this sense being 1966 for much of the novella) and then throwing it into a different light with flashbacks leading up to the night of a fateful crime described in the opening pages. She also throws a couple of genuinely intriguing curveballs into proceedings that caught me off guard and increased my interest in how the tale was going to pay off.

However - and this is a big however - Scarecrows is not at all creepy or frightening. It is, at best, mildly tense in a few scenes, and to my mind, a story about disappearances and murders in amongst fully-grown rows of corn that one young girl claims were committed by animated scarecrows, should be straight-out terrifying.

I also had a great deal of trouble understanding certain character's motivations and the actions they engaged in. At one point, for example, a psychiatrist opts to live on the farm where a crime was committed and dedicate his entire time to this one case. I couldn't help but wonder about the rest of his caseload? And how ethically compromised he was being in getting so close to his patient and her family. Oddly enough, this psychiatrist only comes to work on the case at the invitation of a colleague - the colleague being the one who dominates the early passages with the child in a mental health hospital. Only that original psychiatrist's storyline goes absolutely nowhere. Why even have her in the story? Why not just start with the latter psychiatrist and go from there?

Perhaps I'm being picky with such concerns given this is a story about scarecrows who may be murdering people. But these kinds of details threw me right out of the story and each time it happened, I found it more bothersome to climb back on. That reluctance was exacerbated by Hayton's stilted dialogue which never sounded "right" to my reading ear.

At its core Scarecrows is comprised of a quality idea and contains a couple of surprising twists, but too much went wrong with the execution of this one for me to be able to recommend it. I suspect those who are more prepared to just "go with it" will have a much better time than I.

2 Many Characters Whose Arcs Went Nowhere for Scarecrows.

The preceding was based on an eARC provided by Samhain Publishing via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I'm waffling on what rating to give this book. It started off well and I was enjoying the creepy folklore aspect to the story until about 3/4 of the way in when it changed into a zombie fight. (I like zombies, but to me it just didn't seem to fit with the beginning of the book)

The thing that killed me was the multitude of errors. Typos and wrong words (where/were, too/to, etc.) littered the pages.

I'm not sure if I want to give this book 2 stars or 3. As it is without a good proofread, I think I have to give it a 2....but I wonder what my perception would be if it were corrected. I think it would probably be closer to 3 stars, but...?