Welcome to Cherry Hill. Attendance is mandatory. The Cherry Hill Sanitarium isn't a friendly place. The inmates are among the most mentally deranged and dangerous minds known to the world. It's the sort of place that sane people would do well to avoid, if they value their lives.
John Doe is not a normal man. He can't remember his name, nor much of his past. He's almost certain he's been dead for a while, and that the asylum that has become his residence is haunted by more than broken minds and twisted memories.
John isn't wrong. Something dark is growing inside the walls of the asylum, something that festers and hungers to be free of its prison. That something has never lived before, but it wants to live now, even if it has to destroy everything it encounters to get its way.
John Doe might just be the only person in the world who can stop the madness that is trying to be born into the walls of Cherry Hill. He might be the only chance for the staff and the patients alike. The problem isn't simply that he can't remember how to help them. It's worse than that. John Doe is almost certain that if he does remember his past, the knowledge could very well drive him mad.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
James A. Moore was the award winning author of over forty novels, thrillers, dark fantasy and horror alike, including the critically acclaimed Fireworks, Under The Overtree, Blood Red, the Serenity Falls trilogy (featuring his recurring anti-hero, Jonathan Crowley) and his most recent novels, seven Forges, The Blasted Lands, City of Wonders , The Silent Army and the forthcoming The Gates of The Dead (Book Three in the Tides of War Series) and A Hell Within, co-authored with Charles R. Rutledge.
A mental institution with a monster plaguing the patients might sound a bit cliched for a horror novel, but this one has a few nice twists. One of the newer patients is an older gentleman who forgets his past. As the doctors learn more about his dark identity, some chilling facts come to light that put him in the crosshairs of homicide detectives.
Cherry Hill introduced me to a recurring character named Jonathon Crowley. He's sort of like James Bond meets one of the Ghostbusters (sans the humor). He's got special powers, a spicy attitude and he doesn't like it when people talk about him so I better stop while I'm ahead.
The first three quarters of the book are more mystery-oriented than horror, although there are some pretty graphic scenes here and there. The book finishes with a lot of action and most questions are wrapped up nicely. I will likely read another Crowley novel. 3.75 stars, rounded. 5,857 Kindle locations. Recommended.
This is a great start to the Jonathan Crowley library by James A. Moore. Set in Cherry Hill Asylum, this novel introduces Crowley, a hunter of evil and demonic things. Moore is a great writer of vivid characters, and has a great sense of pace. With no superfluous sections, it all hones in on the finale, a blood-filled slaughter that brings the book to a shattering climax. Loved it. 4/5
A superpowered John Constantine knockoff with none of the likeability plows through a ponderous tale that does a lot of telling and very little showing. Worse still, not only do none of that characters show the traits that we're told (generally in several paragraphs) that they have, but the omniscient narrator has neither the verve of the 19th century writers who so often employed this method, nor the playful character of such meta-narrators as Brust's Paarfi of Roundwood.
If we trimmed it down to allow dialogue and action to carry the story it would (mercifully) be about 1/3 the length that it is, though I still wouldn't recommend it even then.
My first taste of James A Moore and it certainly won't be my last. A tremendous ghost story set in a creepy asylum, with a really well thought out plot and a host of interesting characters. I just couldn't put the book down.. Great Job :-)