Blog Tour – Dread Wood

Hello hello and welcome or welcome back to my little bookish corner of the internet. Today is my stop on the blog tour for Dread Wood, a new middle grade horror released last month.

Synopsis
Turn the lights on. Lock the door. Things are about to get SERIOUSLY SCARY!
The brand new must-read middle-grade novel from the author of super-spooky Crater Lake. Perfect for 9+ fans of R.L.Stine’s Goosebumps

It’s basically the worst school detention ever. When classmates (but not mate-mates) Hallie, Angelo, Gustav and Naira are forced to come to school on a SATURDAY, they think things can’t get much worse. But they’re wrong. Things are about to get seriously scary.

What has dragged their teacher underground? Why do the creepy caretakers keeping humming the tune to Itsy Bitsy Spider? And what horrors lurk in the shadows, getting stronger and meaner every minute…? Cut off from help and in danger each time they touch the ground, the gang’s only hope is to work together. But it’s no coincidence that they’re all there on detention. Someone has been watching and plotting and is out for revenge…

Review
Recently I’ve been reading some fantastically creepy books, especially those from the middle grade and young adult brackets, and Dread Wood certainly fulfilled that brief.

The group of four students are not those naturally inclined to be friends, and are very different from one another. Put under extreme teacher-eating-monster-stress however, they find that they have more in common than they realised, and, more than that, are forced to trust one another due to the circumstances they’re facing. Their interactions feel believable and honest, as does their character development, together and separately.

While I did find the evil scientist trope a bit of a disappointment, and feel this book would have actually been better to have had a supernatural / paranormal background to it, the other scientific aspects of the story were interesting. That the school had animals that they took care of, and one of the little group happened to be really knowledgeable about the spiders and insects was genuinely interesting. I even learned some spider facts!

With a fast-paced plot, characters you will come to very much care about, and absolutely scary things happening, this will well go down as a modern Goosebumps-type read.

Thanks for stopping by for this review today, and be sure to keep an eye out for the other posts on the blog tour. Dread Wood is out now.