While growing up, my children would spend hours exploring the woods. But the woods surrounding my house aren’t filled with the magic, mystery, and terror that Marie and her friends are about to experience in Spellhollow Wood.
This is the story of a young girl searching for her mother whose kidnapping and disappearance she was involved in but has forgotten. Marie has no memory of her mom, what happened, or how she is basically the one who ensured her mom’s disappearance.
She becomes involved with the wrong crowd and is constantly getting in trouble. Marie’s father is at his wit’s end with his daughter.
Then one day her eyes are opened, and she remembers all. Once Marie remembers what happened, she dumps the bad crowd she had been hanging around with and obtains new friends that want to help her find her mom. These friends are anything but normal; they aren’t even human. And the woods they are searching for Marie’s mom in are anything but normal woods.
Marie, convinced of the magic in the woods, believes that her mom is alive and waiting on her to free her from whatever has trapped her there. Will Marie succeed in saving her mom? Is her mom still alive? Or will Marie lose her life trying to save someone who isn’t any longer alive? This story will keep you turning the pages in anticipation until the very end.
This story is delightful at times, filled with beautiful sights and sounds along with beautiful, magical creatures, such as the ulicor. At other times, this story is nightmarish, filled with horrible monsters such as the gight, the gwlligwitch, and the trollogre. Then there are the deadly places.
This unputdownable book is a must-read for fantasy lovers. I was sent a copy of it in exchange for an honest review. If you would like to read this book for yourself, I’ve provided an Amazon link for it below.
Amazon Link: Spellhollow Woods
Favorite Sentences:
And then, on this clear night, the world they knew turned upside down.
The thick branch that Perion was touching moments before had somehow bent itself backwards—straight across his throat—where it trapped him against the oak tree’s trunk.
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The deep groaning became louder and more ferocious, sounding like a hundred trees moaning and creaking against a house during a magnificent storm.
There was a half-inch of grime under his fingernails and his breath marked a new definition of foul.
Then came the worst: the clear outlines of deformed faces and rotted corpses, deeply sunken into hundreds of tree trunks, with gaping eyes and mouths, suffering in endless torture.
New Words Learned:
acerbity – harshness or severity, as of temper or expression
aggregate – formed by the conjunction or collection of particulars into a whole mass or sum; total; combined
confusticate – confuse or perplex; bewilder
fray – a fight, battle, or skirmish
frenetic – frantic, frenzied
About the Author:
Joseph Scotti was born in the Bronx, New York in 1962, before his family relocated to central New Jersey in 1969, where he grew up as a run-of-the-mill 1970’s slacker and dreamer. His early childhood was misspent devouring super-hero and science fiction TV shows and movies, until he chose the crown jewel of wallet-burning career paths, a four-year film school education in the 1980’s. Since then Joe has worked as an on-spec screenwriter in addition to freelance film and video production and has written and directed several of his own movie projects. After some dozen screenplays, he at last tried his hand at prose, working now mostly in the adventure fantasy and horror genres. During the day, he works as an IT specialist.
During the late 1960s and 70s, Joe and his family spent many summers vacationing in New York State, where he met and eventually became good friends with Emily “Marie” Meehanan, whose real-life stories became the narrative threads for Joe’s latest project. Spellhollow Wood, available through Amazon Kindle, is his first novel.
