The Chill

When Stephen King says a book is “Terrific” I’ll I usually take him at his word. He wasn’t wrong with The Chill, a book I thought going by the cover was about something spooky with lots of snow and ice, no this book has water at its very core, lots and lots of it and the secrets that hide within its murky depths.The Chill refers to the Chilewaukee Reservoir in upstate New York. A reservoir created to serve the needs of NYC’s vast population and it hides within its depths a town that was sacrificed to make way for the reservoir and dam and that enough just gives me the creeps.The story introduces us to the locals including a police chief and his wayward twenty something son, and a young woman who has returned to the area as a police offer after living in NYC with her tunnel digger father for many years. Their paths all cross when the rain starts.The dam and reservoir are designed to only hold so much water and the dam is old and starting to show its age. An inspector is sent up to examine the structure and he worries for what he sees, money needs to be thrown at it to make it safe and if the dam fails who knows how much damage and lives will be lost.This is not a book about dam safety, you see something strange is going on, a body is found in the water, a man thought to have been killed by accident turns up alive and long dead people start are making themselves known. What secrets are hidden by the reservoir? Will they remain hidden?I don’t want to say anymore because spoilers and all that! This was a spooky read and totally not what I expected. My only gripe was it was maybe a little bit longer than it needed to be but all in all it was a good read and perfect for the upcoming colder months to settle in with.

When you read the first book by an author who is new to you, it's always a risk. Sometimes you're disappointed, and then other times you're rewarded for the gamble.The Chill was a reward; a great piece of storytelling that weaves fact and fiction so you can't tell where one ends and the other begins.I loved The Chill. A great slice of old school horror. Dive in, you won't regret it.

Maybe I'm a harsh critic or hard to please on the horror front but I feel this that this, along with other books recently, has been categorised as horror when it really isn't. There are acts of horrific behaviour, ghosts and supernatural goings-on but, to me, those alone don't qualify it as horror; it's a supernatural thriller, albeit a good one. That's the gripe out of the way.Carson has written a hugely enjoyable, terse story with some which slowly tightens the screw on the reader in terms of heightened stakes and increasing tension. The isolation of Torrance in the Catskills is nicely done; it's remote enough to harbour such malevolence yet close enough to NYC to trigger a domino effect to cripple that city.He seems to have done his homework on dams as the reader is kept well informed without it being at the expense of the pace or the narrative. He's also not scared of following though on the story's threat and unleashing disaster; a wonderfully written section which hops from location to location introducing us to new characters marvelling at the first sunset in nearly two weeks as the rain finally relents, only for it to be a dark portent and sweep back through those same locations as disaster befalls them.Not particularly scary but very enjoyable. I hope there's more to come.

Scott Carson’s debut chiller-thriller, or dare I say ‘horror’ because the publishing industry won’t, released to a tsunami of hype. The likes of Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Michael Connelly all threw their weight behind it. And King’s wasn’t his stock, “If you like my stuff you’ll love this.” So I had high hopes, but did it deliver on the hype?The novel is set predominantly in the Catskill mountains in upstate New York at the Chilewaukee reservoir, known to the locals at ‘The Chill.’ And who doesn’t love a good pun? The Chill is a relic: a reservoir built to ensure a clean water supply for New York downstream, but it was never used. The backstory, and this is where the story really gets going, is that the building of the damn required the displacement of some long established towns, including Galesburg. The town resisted and violently so, but ultimately the powers of New York city built their damn and little Galesburg lost? Or did they?We’re in familiar King-esque troupe that certain spots on this planet are bridges to supernatural planes – think Indian burial grounds and Wendigos – but Carson makes this his own. Those old roots are mentioned but never overplayed. They are one thread of a richer tapestry of interwoven personal histories, whose consequences are playing out in the present.Carson sets up a delicious metaphysical backstory of an old community, connected with the land who gets whipped into a fanatic frenzy by a mysterious figure in protection of their land. This is a protection that will not be bound by time or the limits of moral flesh. The families of Galesburg make a packed to continue their traditions and beliefs, to pass it down the generations.I’ll not say anymore because we’ll get into plot spoilers. But let me just say that Galesburg wants its water back and all the forces seem to be building to threaten the damn, and if a damn breaks then whatever is downstream, including New York city will suffer.The thing I loved most about this novel was the cast of characters. They sucked me in and Aaron in particular, the son of the local sheriff, has a brilliant arc. The other principal character, Gillian, was similarly engaging. Together, these two characters form a composite of our hero. They are both the main protagonists, with demons to overcome, and in their different ways both have a connection with the water at the Chill.It was a slow burn, and I’ve read some of the Amazon and Goodreads reviews which seem to think this is a bad thing. I don’t. The pages drip with a subtle tension that slowly builds, like the pressure at the damn. It’s written in wonderfully short chapters, each of which is rich with the world of the story and the troubles of the characters. The plot is paid out gradually and pulled me in like an insistent tide, making me want to discover more of the lore of Galesburg, the packed the town’s folks made, and how the disaster was to be brought about.There are big themes going on here too: about civilisation and its relationship with nature; about family and responsibility; about community in the modern world; and about loss and how we deal with it. One could ask deeper questions about if people in the present are responsible for the crimes of their ancestors. You don’t have to go that deep and it’s subtle enough for Carson not to get cancelled on social media for posting the question – although Scott Carson is a pen name for New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of 14 other novels, Michael Koryta. These themes are the waves of meaning breaking on the shores of our consciousness that give The Chill a greater resonance for me. They are an irresistible tide that pulls you into the depths of the story and won’t let you go until you turn the last page.The Chill fits into that breed of novel which I’m calling a chiller-thriller. The kind of thing which is really a horror in the supernatural scene but for some reason, probably because the big traditional publishing houses don’t think that horror sells. And maybe it doesn’t in the volume of other genres. But maybe that is also something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, like a lost town under the water of a reservoir. I love CJ Tudor’s and Alex Scott’s novels, and while more crime based they fall into this kind of marketing. This is a side issue and nothing to do with the quality of the books. The Chill could be enjoyed by horror and thriller readers alike. It plays with the edges of fear like it plays with the edges of genres, and maybe that smashing together of the two is another thing that gives the book another layer of meaning.In summary, The Chill was one of the most compelling books I’ve read this year. Scott Carson delivers an irresistible supernatural chiller-thriller, populated by ghosts of a sunken town and characters with depth as deep as the reservoir that might cause the biggest disaster New York city has ever seen. The novel manages to be both intimate and epic in its scope, and its characters will haunt you long after the novel has been drowned among the other books on your shelves.

A totally unexpected find that kept me engaged throughout. The menace was ever-present, compounded by the almost endless downpour that pervaded the story - and were the Stephen King references intentional? If you've read The Shining, you'll know what I mean. An unconventional horror story that was not afraid to take the reader off into all kinds of directions, only to bring us back to the claustrophobic world beneath the dam where the sins of the past are about to be reaped on those in the present. I will look for more by this author.