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Moonbog
The evil glow of the moon lit the path as 12-year-old Billy Wilson walked past the bog. He knew he shouldn't have gone near the inky shadows of the swamp -- but something forced him to come closer to the yawning darkness, the suffocating tangle, the flesh-tearing brambles of Holland Bog. The murky depths of the bog sucked the boy into its fetid earth and claimed its human sacrifice. But one child wasn't enough...
409 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
4 people are currently reading
369 people want to read
About the author
Rick Hautala
137 books125 followersAKA A.J. Matthews
Rick Hautala has more than thirty published books to his credit, including the million copy, international best-seller Nightstone, as well as Twilight Time, Little Brothers, Cold Whisper, Impulse, and The Wildman. He has also published four novels—The White Room, Looking Glass, Unbroken, and Follow—using the pseudonym A. J. Matthews. His more than sixty published short stories have appeared in national and international anthologies and magazines. His short story collection Bedbugs was selected as one of the best horror books of the year in 2003.
A novella titled Reunion was published by PS Publications in December, 2009; and Occasional Demons, a short story collection, is due in 2010 from CD Publications. He wrote the screenplays for several short films, including the multiple award-winning The Ugly Film, based on the short story by Ed Gorman, as well as Peekers, based on a short story by Kealan Patrick Burke, and Dead @ 17, based on the graphic novel by Josh Howard.
A graduate of the University of Maine in Orono with a Master of Art in English Literature (Renaissance and Medieval Literature), Hautala lives in southern Maine with author Holly Newstein. His three sons have all grown up and (mostly) moved out of the house. He served terms as Vice President and Trustee for the Horror Writers Association.
Sadly, Rick died on March 21, 2013.
Rick Hautala has more than thirty published books to his credit, including the million copy, international best-seller Nightstone, as well as Twilight Time, Little Brothers, Cold Whisper, Impulse, and The Wildman. He has also published four novels—The White Room, Looking Glass, Unbroken, and Follow—using the pseudonym A. J. Matthews. His more than sixty published short stories have appeared in national and international anthologies and magazines. His short story collection Bedbugs was selected as one of the best horror books of the year in 2003.
A novella titled Reunion was published by PS Publications in December, 2009; and Occasional Demons, a short story collection, is due in 2010 from CD Publications. He wrote the screenplays for several short films, including the multiple award-winning The Ugly Film, based on the short story by Ed Gorman, as well as Peekers, based on a short story by Kealan Patrick Burke, and Dead @ 17, based on the graphic novel by Josh Howard.
A graduate of the University of Maine in Orono with a Master of Art in English Literature (Renaissance and Medieval Literature), Hautala lives in southern Maine with author Holly Newstein. His three sons have all grown up and (mostly) moved out of the house. He served terms as Vice President and Trustee for the Horror Writers Association.
Sadly, Rick died on March 21, 2013.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
August 31, 2017
Les lives in Maine. He repeatedly finds children who’ve been abandoned in Holland Bog by other children and then he sodomizes them, and guts them at the moment of his orgasm before dragging their corpses around aimlessly until someone sees him. Maine is a terrible place.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 14, 2014
Maine's second most famous horror author Rick Hautala delivered a sophomore novel of suspense and terror unlike any other at the time. Moonbog is a deeply disturbing book set in a small town in Maine where young boys have gone missing over the past couple of years. A killer lurks within the town stalking his victims before allowing the bog to claim them.
Apparently, Hautala has gone on record saying this book is his least favorite he has written. He's even shocked when fans tell him they enjoy this book. A novel about rape and murder of young boys in Maine is shocking to say the least. Truly I am surprised this was even written. This is actually the first horror novel I ever remember reading. I remember it being passed around in junior high because of the disturbing content and the shock value. While the subject matter is completely horrifying and disturbing, Hautala has wrote a solid novel. I thought all of the characters were extremely well developed, the town was populated with some unique characters and the pages flew by. It is not a novel for the squeamish to say the least. In fact if you don't have a strong stomach you might want to avoid it. Overall I enjoyed the pacing the Hautala's ability to shock the reader. I will be reading more of his books (some again for the first time in years). Sadly, he passed away last year before I ever got the chance to meet him. He really helped me develop a love of horror in my youth and he will be missed.
Apparently, Hautala has gone on record saying this book is his least favorite he has written. He's even shocked when fans tell him they enjoy this book. A novel about rape and murder of young boys in Maine is shocking to say the least. Truly I am surprised this was even written. This is actually the first horror novel I ever remember reading. I remember it being passed around in junior high because of the disturbing content and the shock value. While the subject matter is completely horrifying and disturbing, Hautala has wrote a solid novel. I thought all of the characters were extremely well developed, the town was populated with some unique characters and the pages flew by. It is not a novel for the squeamish to say the least. In fact if you don't have a strong stomach you might want to avoid it. Overall I enjoyed the pacing the Hautala's ability to shock the reader. I will be reading more of his books (some again for the first time in years). Sadly, he passed away last year before I ever got the chance to meet him. He really helped me develop a love of horror in my youth and he will be missed.
August 18, 2017
A brilliantly written book full of suspense and terror. I quite liked this tale of child abduction set in 1977. There are some great twists in this story (I don't give any spoilers here). Highty recommended. I definitely will read more books by this author.
April 18, 2022
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I only spent like $2 on this so I’m not *super* upset, but I was expecting a creature feature. The cover and the synopsis made me think I was getting a bog monster story. Not at all, just a serial killer thriller. And it was fine. One really graphic scene that was crazy gratuitous.
Idk, I probably would have liked this more if it was a monster story like the cover and synopsis promised 😂
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I only spent like $2 on this so I’m not *super* upset, but I was expecting a creature feature. The cover and the synopsis made me think I was getting a bog monster story. Not at all, just a serial killer thriller. And it was fine. One really graphic scene that was crazy gratuitous.
Idk, I probably would have liked this more if it was a monster story like the cover and synopsis promised 😂
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 9, 2015
it was a bit wordy in between the exciting scenes but def worth reading. It has been a while since ive read it, the last time was when i was 13 years old, but from what i remembe i really enjoyed it.
March 3, 2016
What's creepier than a bog? Half forest, half lake, it's a part of nature that's managed to strike a balance between life and death and still survive. It's a perfect setting for a horror novel, and I was as excited to read this now as I was when I first read it in 1995 (I had forgotten pretty much everything about this book since then).
Sadly, Moonbog isn't a supernatural story. Our main character, David, returns to his small hometown to settle his mother's will (which, for some reason, is always capitalized as "Will" in the novel), and while he's there he gets caught up in a series of murdered and missing children. Of course, the eerie bog right on the edge of town is a central part of the story, which adds to the atmosphere, but I felt like there was a lot lost by not having some mystical creature roaming the bog.
In Moondeath, Hautala avoided relying on the whodunnit aspect that takes up a large portion of other werewolf stories, but in Moonbog, he goes back to exactly that. The big question of the novel is who's abducting and killing the children. Hautala gives us a couple of options as to the killer's identity, making some of them so obvious as to make us think they're red herrings, while also creating enough suspicion to keep us from writing them off completely. The reveal was satisfying, but getting there was a bit of a slog. He drew out the pursuit part of the story, making it lack the tension it needed. Also, Hautala's narrative style is fine, but he tends to spend a lot of time on incidental details that don't add much to the story.
I'm seeing the same problems with Hautala as I did with Richard Laymon, though, as he doesn't do much for his female characters. David's girlfriend is portrayed as a one-dimensional harpy, and aside from the mothers of the missing children, she's the only female character who gets any attention in the book. There's no real reason as to why she acts the way she does, and we get very little of the story told from her perspective to allow us to sympathize with her frustration. Apparently Hautala just needed a screeching foil for his main character, and he gave that role to his girlfriend.
That problem could be due to his characterization, which felt weak. His antagonist was just an evil guy, whose motivations are explained away by another character making suppositions about the other person, and that's done in just a few pages. Even his protagonists were shells instead of realized, so when people died, there was no investment to make the deaths impactful. They were just there to service the story, and whatever connections could have been there just didn't matter.
In the end, the potential for the story outweighs its execution. This is the second horror novel I've read that has used a bog as a central setting (the other being The Man in the Moss by Phil Rickman), and both of them were lacking. Maybe it's because I've always had a fascination with bogs, and I build up the idea of the story to impossible levels. Regardless, I'm still waiting to read a good horror novel that features a bog.
Unfortunate Musical Connection: "Moonchild" by Iron Maiden (again)
Sadly, Moonbog isn't a supernatural story. Our main character, David, returns to his small hometown to settle his mother's will (which, for some reason, is always capitalized as "Will" in the novel), and while he's there he gets caught up in a series of murdered and missing children. Of course, the eerie bog right on the edge of town is a central part of the story, which adds to the atmosphere, but I felt like there was a lot lost by not having some mystical creature roaming the bog.
In Moondeath, Hautala avoided relying on the whodunnit aspect that takes up a large portion of other werewolf stories, but in Moonbog, he goes back to exactly that. The big question of the novel is who's abducting and killing the children. Hautala gives us a couple of options as to the killer's identity, making some of them so obvious as to make us think they're red herrings, while also creating enough suspicion to keep us from writing them off completely. The reveal was satisfying, but getting there was a bit of a slog. He drew out the pursuit part of the story, making it lack the tension it needed. Also, Hautala's narrative style is fine, but he tends to spend a lot of time on incidental details that don't add much to the story.
I'm seeing the same problems with Hautala as I did with Richard Laymon, though, as he doesn't do much for his female characters. David's girlfriend is portrayed as a one-dimensional harpy, and aside from the mothers of the missing children, she's the only female character who gets any attention in the book. There's no real reason as to why she acts the way she does, and we get very little of the story told from her perspective to allow us to sympathize with her frustration. Apparently Hautala just needed a screeching foil for his main character, and he gave that role to his girlfriend.
That problem could be due to his characterization, which felt weak. His antagonist was just an evil guy, whose motivations are explained away by another character making suppositions about the other person, and that's done in just a few pages. Even his protagonists were shells instead of realized, so when people died, there was no investment to make the deaths impactful. They were just there to service the story, and whatever connections could have been there just didn't matter.
In the end, the potential for the story outweighs its execution. This is the second horror novel I've read that has used a bog as a central setting (the other being The Man in the Moss by Phil Rickman), and both of them were lacking. Maybe it's because I've always had a fascination with bogs, and I build up the idea of the story to impossible levels. Regardless, I'm still waiting to read a good horror novel that features a bog.
Unfortunate Musical Connection: "Moonchild" by Iron Maiden (again)
April 9, 2018
Good old horror.
I heard about this book on Twitter and picked it up although this was the first time I heard of this author. I'm glad I did. And I certainly look forward to reading more of Rick Hautala soon!
I heard about this book on Twitter and picked it up although this was the first time I heard of this author. I'm glad I did. And I certainly look forward to reading more of Rick Hautala soon!
January 31, 2016
Read almost 30 years ago. Loved it. Years later tried to find book again . Didn't remember author and never found it until now . Thrilled can't wait to read again and more of his books!
December 17, 2020
Nope! Forget it! Unless you're into serial killer/pedophile rapists who likes to disembowel little male children, this is not the book for you. My main problem with the book is that the main story line suffers and lags tremendously, which is unlike Hautalas nature. Out of all the books that I've read by Rick, this one is by far the most disturbing, and if that's what he was trying to do here, I'd have to say he nailed it. Moonbog is a very ugly book in general, it captivates the sort of eerie dread you would expect from a childs point of view at times, when he engages contact with the killer. The rest of the characters just seem disconnected, nothing really comes together here, which is again unlike Ricks style. Make no mistake, Rick Hautala was an amazing horror writer, if you're stumbling upon this author for the first time, I want to steer you away from this, and redirect you to Dead Voices, which was released in 1990. This was one of my very favorite books by Hautala, but Moonbog should never be the first read by this author...I think once you've seasoned yourself with some of his latter and better works, then you can read Moonbog to see how much he's evolved. I miss you, Rick!
October 2, 2023
This is another one of those books that promises something completely different than what it delivers. From the cover and synopsis, you'd think this was a creature feature about a child-eating monster living in the bog. Instead, the only monster is human, and he's a pedophile. Which is, of course, still a horror story - it has some graphic scenes of child rape, general abuse, and murder. I'm glad I knew this before I read the book, so I was prepared for what to expect. It's fairly well-written for the 80's horror genre, and an overall better book that Hautala's biggest seller "Night Stone". I'm not sure I would enjoy reading this one again due to the subject matter though.
I also never figured out why the title is Moonbog when the place is never called that and the moon doesn't feature into it at all.
I also never figured out why the title is Moonbog when the place is never called that and the moon doesn't feature into it at all.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 23, 2023
I was expecting a book about a haunted bog. I did not get a book about a haunted bog, this is a recurring theme in my reading journey. Moonbog was not a bad book; it wasn't what I was expecting, but it was well written and kept me guessing until close enough to the end. Unfortunately, I must once again lodge my perennial complaint: why are all these horror novels so goddamn rapey? If I had a nickel for every child-raping murderer I've read about this year I would have two nickels. That's too many child-raping serial killers. I understand that the topic is horrific and it's an easy source of shock value, but the fact that both books had an 'on-screen' rape scene involving a twelve-year-old boy is kind of disturbing. I don't think Moonbog or The Voice in the Basement would get published these days and that's probably for the best. Wish me luck on finding a rape-free read.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 2, 2024
Another misleading cover and synopsis from the infamous Zebra books of the 1980's.
First of all, this not a horror novel. There is no bog/swamp creature as shown on the cover.
This is basically a crime/ thriller/family drama mashup. A child serial killer is on the loose in a small town in Maine that has a very large bog area. This books goes on way longer than is should have. We get lots of townsfolk conversations, useless bickering between 2 people dating, and more than enough uses of the word peepers (little frogs). Rick Hautala was Zebra's answer to Stephen King. Both are from Maine and use it in many of their novels. Hautala has many novels available to read, and most are in the Horror genre. (Winter Wake and Nightstone) but this was not one of them.
First of all, this not a horror novel. There is no bog/swamp creature as shown on the cover.
This is basically a crime/ thriller/family drama mashup. A child serial killer is on the loose in a small town in Maine that has a very large bog area. This books goes on way longer than is should have. We get lots of townsfolk conversations, useless bickering between 2 people dating, and more than enough uses of the word peepers (little frogs). Rick Hautala was Zebra's answer to Stephen King. Both are from Maine and use it in many of their novels. Hautala has many novels available to read, and most are in the Horror genre. (Winter Wake and Nightstone) but this was not one of them.
November 7, 2025
Not sure why this has gotten such bad reviews on here. Especially the 1-star review from Grady Hendrix. Sure, the cover is misleading and the blurb on the back is too...but it was still a good read.
Yes, I wanted bog monsters! Or at least one bog monster! Even still, I liked this story and thought it was a good read. I've never read any fiction by Grady Hendrix, but if I ever do, I'll try not to judge/review as harshly as he has done here.
Either way, I'm looking forward to reading more by Hautala.
Yes, I wanted bog monsters! Or at least one bog monster! Even still, I liked this story and thought it was a good read. I've never read any fiction by Grady Hendrix, but if I ever do, I'll try not to judge/review as harshly as he has done here.
Either way, I'm looking forward to reading more by Hautala.
October 16, 2024
solid straight 4
great location, awesome small town building, some fantastic secondary characters
The one death of the adult did not make sense to me, it seemed unnecessary
But, overall, not too bad, maybe a good re-read
Although, I will warn folks looking for monsters or creature features, the cover is click bait so to speak
great location, awesome small town building, some fantastic secondary characters
The one death of the adult did not make sense to me, it seemed unnecessary
But, overall, not too bad, maybe a good re-read
Although, I will warn folks looking for monsters or creature features, the cover is click bait so to speak
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December 10, 2022Fuck this book. Not even 1 star i thought it was horror, sure its horror, the cruelty of someone raping and killing children, no fucking thank you and it doesnt even give a satisfying justifiable ending. I threw it right in the garbage. Just fucking no.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 4, 2019
The cover LIES. Don't promise me a monster in the moonbog if there isn't a monster in the moonbog!
August 31, 2022
Book would have been better I the cover didn't show a monster. I was expecting some type of monster or alien. It was very misleading.
February 19, 2024
More like Moonbog roll. Characters are either dumbasses or shitheads. Sucked. Additionally, the edition I read has loads of editing errors.
July 1, 2021
The cover was incredibly misleading. There are no non-human monsters in this book. It’s also just a terrible book.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews