Afraid

by Jack Kilborn, Phil Gigante (narrator)

WELCOME TO SAFE HAVEN, POPULATION 907...

Nestled in the woods of Wisconsin, Safe Haven is miles from everything. With one road in and out, this is a town so peaceful it has never needed a full-time police force. Until now...

A helicopter has crashed on the outskirts of town and something terrible has been unleashed. A classified secret weapon programmed to kill anything that stands in its way. Now it's headed for the nearest lights to do what it does best. Isolate. Terrorize. Annihilate.

Soon all phone lines are dead and the road is blocked. Safe Haven's only chance for survival rests on the shoulders of an aging county sheriff. And as the body count rises, the sheriff realizes something even more terrifying—maybe death hasn't come to his little town by accident...

WELCOME TO SAFE HAVEN, POPULATION 907... 906... 905...

AFRAID by Jack Kilborn
Are you afraid of the dark? You will be.

Audible Audio

Published April 1, 2009

About the author

Jack Kilborn is pen name for writer J.A. Konrath. The Kilborn name denotes his horror novels; the Konrath name his thrillers.

Reviews

[Sam Levy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don’t be fooled by the blurb on the back that makes it sound like Super 8 or a similarly plotted monster rampage, it very quickly becomes obvious this is a multi-person slasher with an inbuilt reason the slasher villains are ludicrously sadistic. Not quite the book I was hoping for but for what it is it’s pacey and doesn’t waste time on preamble, hitting the ground running with the helicopter crash that kickstarts the plot.

It’s a hard thing to maintain for 350 pages and there are wobbles, the various scenes of brutal violence becoming rote at times because of their relentlessness, but in amongst these there are some great moments (the girl trapped in a pile of discarded bodies in particular is nauseatingly written in a good way).

I enjoyed the bulk of the characters, although I was hoping that the broader town would get bought in in a Salems Lot kind of way. Instead early on we meet our core character set in various scenes, and we stay on them once introduced. Side characters shuffle in and out but there’s a limited view of the town itself, of how it functions and the spiderweb of small town gossip when everyone knows everyone. It’s hard to put in a thrill ride like this one but those early scenes with various characters seem to be pointing towards something the book goes on to lose interest in.

[Val · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book 3 in The Konrath Dark Thriller series. Terror and fear are unleashed when a helicopter carrying a classified secret weapon, programmed to take out anything in its path, crashes on a small isolated town called Safe Haven. It’s not long before the body count starts rising, the Sheriff soon starts asking if the crash was indeed an accident, or something altogether more sinister….