October Skies by Alex Scarrow
Until I started this book reviewing stuff, I never actually read much horror. But publishers seem to be sending me significant amounts, and I am discovering the variety of work within the genre fascinating.
Alex Scarrow is an established author of thrillers. Biographical information is very sketchy, but he does have a blog that he sporadically expands that reveals an interesting mind behind the publicist description of a man with a ‘nomadic lifestyle with his wife and son.’
But first the book. The year is 1856 and two small groups of Americans are heading west across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains in search of adventure and a new life. The two groups decide to travel together only to reduce the chance of Indian trouble. Together the party numbers about 130. But one group is made up of religious fanatics, almost a breakaway cult of the Mormon church. The others are a general gathering of settlers seeking a better life among them an Arabic migrant family, a southern gentleman traveling with his Negro wife and a single young Brit from the wealthy middle classes out to see the world before returning home to a medical career. By the time they leave the safety of the eastern states it is late spring, and many predict that they will never get across the mountains before winter.
But their guide knows a shortcut, not very wagon friendly, but these remote mountain passes should make it possible to get to Oregon before winter takes hold. But weeks into the journey one of the Mormon wagons breaks down and since the religious party refuses to leave anyone behind, the whole group is forced to wait until a temporary repair is accomplished. And you know it, the temporary repair cannot stand up to the rough country involved in the ’shortcut’. But finally, late September, and the whole group is finally over the high pass when it begins to snow and snow and snow. Winter arrives early. And none of them are ever heard from again. Until Julian Cooke stumbles across a rotting wagon wheel in 2008. Further searching locates a diary, and suddenly he decides to shelve the boring documentary he was filming in favour of this mysterious disappearance. Putting together all the resources he can muster, he begins what he hopes will become a feature length docudrama. That is until people start dying.
This is a real page turner. Scarrow moves back and forth between the 1856 story behind the diary and Cooke’s investigations and their fatal consequences. The fatalities mount, possibly more rapidly in 1856, but then are they linked? Maybe the 2008 deaths are just more of the same.
I do have one objection. I think the revelation of the murderer is just a little to convenient and the links to modern times are tenuous, but believe me as you are caught up in the book, it doesn’t matter.
