Widow

by Rob Bliss, Jeremy Caniglia (Illustrator)

When Joan's husband dies, she is forced to move with her young son, Joey, from home to home. But at each home, an evil follows, forcing Joan and Joey to move again and again, hunted.They never know why they’re being hunted. All they can do is run away from the constant threat until, hopefully, it gives up the chase … or they find a savior who can either end it, or help them to fight it forever."

144 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 15, 2019

Reviews

[✨Bean's Books✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

The three little pigs...
In this book, Bliss takes us on a journey following Joan and Joey, a widowed mother and her son, as they move from place to place and, at times, only staying one step ahead of the evil that stalks them.
This book is very well written. Much like the author's other work. And it proves without a doubt that this author has not only talent but imagination to boot. Again Bliss is able to pull you right in from the beginning and you have no choice but to just go with it. Questions of the "why" and "how" seem futile in this very dark twist on the classic fairy tale. Just keep repeating to yourself: "just go with it!" LOL You'll get there! 😉
I really enjoyed this one. Not as much as I enjoyed The Bride Stripped Bare, but I definitely enjoyed it none the less. And for the author to be able to fit that much story and detail into a novella definitely is astounding.
If you like dark fairy tales and fantasies or horror, you would most certainly enjoy this delightful short read. I recommend this one for sure.

[Mike Kazmierczak · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was happy to win a copy of this eBook in a drawing by Necro Publications. As such, I really wanted to like it. Necro Publications puts out good books and as a sign of my appreciation for winning in the drawing, I wanted to help promote a good book by them. Unfortunately I can't do that with this book.

The story: after Joan's husband dies, she has to move with her son Joey to a house they can afford. They find themselves being attacked in the house by a giant pig so they run away and find a new house. Where they again are attacked and again move. Repeat that one more time until they find someone who can help them stop moving.

I could probably try better to sell the book but I couldn't really find a story. There are the events that happen to some decent enough characters but the story was more of a rambling. I did not see any purpose except to run and survive. I wasn't really involved enough in their lives to care if they lived or not. Decisions were being made that didn't make much sense. And events happened that didn't make much sense. At one point military men arrive in helicopters at Joan's house for no real reason. She chases them away with a rifle but we never see the military men again. It made no sense to me why they were even in the story. The book did a kind of backwards retelling of The Three Little Pigs. Rather than a wolf destroying a house of straw, then wood, then brick, WIDOW gives us a pig that destroys a house of brick, then wood, then straw. A wolf even makes an appearance near the end of the book. I'm not sure if that was the point of the story or it was just an Easter Egg to discover. I thought at one point there was an understory about humanity being too civilized and that has led to its downfall, people are better away and by themselves. If that was the case, I couldn't find enough evidence in that understory, plus the ending does not ring true since Joan only survives because she got help from someone else. By the end of the book, I still didn't really care about the characters and was mostly trying to satisfy my curiosity about how the book would end.

[Mike Wilshin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The other reviews have let the pig outta the poke so to speak regarding the fairytale aspect of this novel so there’s no need to dip into that trough further.
This kind of story from a lesser writer might have gone awry in so many ways. However Bliss makes much of what could be hallucinatory seeming nowhere set pieces feel meaningful. Fraught with dread and menace, we’re invested in the Widow & her son’s trials from chapter one. And as the story progressed I felt as trapped as the characters.

[Iseult Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ll huff and I’ll puff

An odd fairytale that I don’t think I understand the symbolism of. A widow and her son run from enemies in this magic realism retelling of the three little pigs. All the elements are there, but this time the pigs are the monsters. I think it’s about globalization and the evils of technology, but I’m not sure. Maybe it’s about government and the marginalized. An interesting read, well written, with some lovely passages.

[Tam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good, old-fashioned horror at its best!

This is one intense, twisted, addictive novel laced with just enough pulse-pounding suspense and skin-crawling creep factor to keep you on the edge of your seat! Not only is this very well-written with wonderfully-interesting characters, but the suspense builds at just the right pace as the story unfolds, and I loved the subtle nod to a popular fairy tale. This "unputdownable"story also has one shocking surprise after another along with a major twist at the end.

Just an all-around excellent read! I'm now a confirmed Bliss fan!

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mother and son are hunted by vindictive giant pigs!

As with many books I review, particularly with authors I do not familiar with, I read little about them in advance and dive straight in and see where it takes me. Rob Bliss’s Widow was such a novel; I was vaguely aware it concerned a woman and her son being stalked by a benevolent presence, but little else. Which it was, and it wasn’t, as the pair were repeatedly hunted by monstrous pigs which were the size of rhinos, who appeared in the middle of the night. That basic synopsis makes Widow sound very trashy, but it really is not, far from it. This was a very strange book and I doubt there is any single ‘correct’ interpretation of what it all means (which might also be nothing). I’m certainly not sure I understood it, and after the exceptionally bizarre ending I went right back to the start and read the first 10% again searching for a clue I might have missed which might provide more answers. The author should take that as a compliment. Ambiguity is an important part of the horror genre and Widow has it in buckets, but the next reviewer may well disagree with my interpretation. It’s just one of those books.

The story opens not long after the death of principal character Joan’s husband and she is then forced to move from home to home as they are repeatedly followed by entities which seem to be both hunting them and deliberately destroying the abode they have moved to. Crucially, before the death the family had a pig farm, whether this is the reason why the entities which stalk them take the form of giant pigs is open to question. It is never made clear how many times they have moved, but Joan’s son Joey, longs for a proper home again and as he also sees the pigs, it is clear the manifestations are not merely from the imagination of Joan.

There was something of the classic fairy-tale in Widow, or an inversion of it, where the little (hardly!) pigs become the hunters and destroy yet another house. Of course, in the Three Little Pigs story there is also a wolf, so make sure you hang in here for a howler of an ending! There were many very peculiar passages of action, for example, when an old truck driver gives Joan the key to live in his remote cabin (who would do that?) or when an armed policeman turns up at her cabin. It had a strange magical realism vibe to it and once in the cabin the mother and son become hunters themselves, literally overnight, killing for food.

Some readers may find the vagueness of it all frustrating; why were they being hunted at all? The mother repeatedly does strange stuff; at one point they build a house in a field made from hay-bales. Hang on a minute, didn’t one of the three pigs live in a straw house? I get the feeling not all of this was supposed to make sense. It that was deliberate the author surely nailed it! There are relatively few characters in the book, but the relationship between Joey and his mother was a real standout and the matter of fact way the little boy accepts the normality of being stalked by a giant pig was quite unnerving; “The house is gone, mommy. The piggy’s eating it,” he says before they hit the road once again. Widow is mainly written in the third person from Joan’s point of view, but it does move to Joey on occasions also.

I don’t want to say much more about Widow otherwise I’ll be heading into spoiler territory. It’s quirky, odd and a rather unique read which is likely to be one of those books which will both split the critics and frustrate readers. Having said that, I still found it oddly charming. Potentially it could have been developed into a more substantial work as so much is left unsaid. Does it have a deeper, more symbolic, meaning? Only Rob Bliss can answer that question. Or perhaps it is simply about a mother and son being stalked by giant pigs? I’m happy either way.