BOOK REVIEW: WHERE THEY WAIT BY SCOTT CARSON

10/3/2022

HORROR BOOK REVIEW WHERE THEY WAIT- THE MOST COMPULSIVE AND CREEPY PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER OF 2021 BY SCOTT CARSON .png

Publisher: Welbeck
Release date: Nov 2021
Length: 386 pages

The hook: A new supernatural novel about a sinister mindfulness app with fatal consequences

The Blurb: Desperate journalist Nick Bishop takes a job profiling new mindfulness app, Clarity. Relaxing meditations are mixed with haunting ‘sleep songs’ where a woman’s voice sings users into a deep sleep.

Then the nightmares begin.

Vivid and chilling, they feature a dead woman who calls Nick by name, whispering guidance – or are they threats?

Soon, he can’t escape her voice. And that’s when he makes a terrifying discovery: no one involved with Clarity has any interest in his article. Their interest is in him.

Because whilst he may not have any memory of it, he’s one of twenty people who have heard this sinister song before, and the only one who is still alive...

Amazon:

https://smarturl.it/h9a7ra

Author’s website:

https://michaelkoryta.com

Trigger warnings: night terrors and sleep disorders

The Review:
Last year, Scott Carson’s first horror novel The Chill, blew me away. (A small aside, Scott Carson is the alter ego of the hit thriller writer Michael Koryta). The Chill was my favourite read of last year and reminded me of the best of 1980s and 90s commercial horror, like King, Koonz or McCammon at their best. Written in that unselfconscious, non-ironic register, The Chill took me on a wild supernatural ride where I cared deeply about what happened to the characters.

And so it was that as soon as I put down that novel, I immediately pre-ordered Where They Wait. You could say I’m a fan; but after only one book, you could also say, Where They Wait had a lot to live up to. The question is, did it?

As the blurb indicates, we follow hard up journalist Nick Bishop’s return home, hopefully briefly, to take a well-paid but pretty shitty gig writing a profile for his Alma Mater’s alumni magazine. This is quite the comedown for a once hard hitting war journalist, but he needs the cash, and it would be an opportunity to see his invalid mother. So far, so typical. But even here, Carson starts us with a sense of unease. Things aren’t right with Nick, in a way. He can’t put a finger on himself. This is something Where They Wait does so well. It takes familiar tropes and subtly twists them, so that they have a sense of familiarity but also a freshness that makes the story come alive.

The story’s hook is the deadly app. This alone gives the book a contemporary twist. It’s hard not to feel manipulated by tech companies and their algorithms. And if you think you’re not, you are probably the biggest mark in the room. Carson, however, doesn’t re-tread the same territory of the subtly dystopian novel like The Circle, which was way ahead of the curve on the mass manipulation of social media. Instead, Where They Wait is in far more personal territory – the horror writer’s true playground. What could be more personal than sleep and your dreams, when we are at are most venerable? And everyone must sleep at in the end.

In regard to the app, our protagonist Nick expresses nothing but cynicism at the start. For example, there is some brilliant dialogue between Nick and his old friend Pat, who offers him the gig. Come home and interview yet another ‘next big thing’ tech millionaire about his ‘next big thing’ app-platform-code, whatever. I was laughing out loud at the dryness of the humour of the ‘Oh God, seriously, another geek with a keyboard and a talent for coding who we are supposed to think is a genius?’ One of my pet hates are tech millionaires who made all their money from a data scraping, psychologically manipulating, democracy undermining app, who then have a come to Jesus moment and realises the world isn’t just zeros and ones and there is this thing called ethics. Then they quit their jobs—with all that money, remember—and now see it as their messianic duty to geek-splain why this is unethical, but with the patina of ‘I’ve just discovered all this stuff about society.’ No one seems to have the heart to tell them there are library sections full of social science and philosophy on this. If they’d read a little by of Marshal McLuhan or, heck, Curren and Seaton’s theories on power and the media, which the rest of us were reading as undergraduates in the 90s, they might realise they’ve nothing new to tell us, and they should shut the [expletive] up and get on with fixing the mess they made. Alas! Anyway, Carson captures this eye roll at tech perfectly.

Back to the novel. But Nick, ever the good journalist (and friend to Pat) plays along. The fun starts when Nick, who never remembers his dreams, agrees to try the sleep app, and it works so well, he’s hooked. We’re only a few chapters in and from here on the novel slowly turns the screw.

Nick is too good a journalist to just write a puff piece, and he wants to know more about the app. Here, Carson introduces the first touches of creepiness, along with a mystery of just how the trick is done. Nick digs and, as he does, the mystery deepens, and the dread grows along with the uncanny effects of the Clarity app.

What we effectively have is a technological twist on the ghost story, one which I didn’t think would play out the way it did. I can’t say more without spoiling the surprise.

Nick’s past, his genius mother now in a home after a devastating stroke, the family cabin by the lake, his old high school crush, the small university town he grew up in, and the Clarity app all combine to simmer in a pot-boiling horror, that combines the old with the new and ties together in surprising but satisfying ways.

If I had one gripe, it would be the two antagonist characters (the two we know are real) could have had a little more depth. This is really a small gripe, and there is a revelation at the end that explains a lot more about one of those character’s motivation. Really, I’m just trying to add a little balance to a review of a book I so thoroughly enjoyed.

Carson’s prose is crisp and fast moving but peppered with wry observations and evocative turns of phrase. The characters are beautifully drawn, which was one of the things I most enjoyed about The Chill as well. Carson gives the impression of a writer who is a skilful artisan of his craft, who feels no need to show off. However, the final two pages were stunningly poetic and profound. These pages delivered both an ethical lesson and a completion to the protagonist’s character arc, which were simply masterful.

Bottom line: Where They Wait is a tense and haunting page-turner, with crisp prose, wonderful characterisation and a cool modern twist on the ghost story. Compulsive reading.

Where They Wait: The most compulsive and creepy psychological thriller of 2021
by Scott Carson

'Horror has a new name and it’s Scott Carson’ Michael Connelly

'Wow!' Stephen King on The Chill___________

A desperate journalist looking for work.
A new mindfulness app that promises deep sleep.
A dead woman's voice heard during app-induced nightmares.
___________
Desperate journalist Nick Bishop takes a job profiling new mindfulness app, Clarity. Relaxing meditations are mixed with haunting 'sleep songs' where a woman's voice sings users into a deep sleep.
Then the nightmares begin.
Vivid and chilling, they feature a dead woman who calls Nick by name, whispering guidance – or are they threats?
Soon, he can't escape her voice. And that's when he makes a terrifying discovery: no one involved with Clarity has any interest in his article. Their interest is in him.
Because whilst he may not have any memory of it, he's one of twenty people who have heard this sinister song before, and the only one who is still alive...

Reviewed by Dan Soule

Dan is a horror author. Find his books Neolithica, Witchopper, The Ash and more online. You can get two free collections of Dan’s previously published short stories on his website https://dansoule.com. Connect with him on social media @writerdansoule.