The Watchers

This is an excellent book for those who want some dark creature horror reading material with nice twists for the holiday season. The main character, Mina, lives in Galway, Ireland. She is a young artist, without a steady job, making enough money selling a few commissioned paintings and occasionally making a killing gambling at cards in order to afford her rent and keep her in booze and cigarettes. Her passion is sitting at public places drawing in her sketchbook the faces of people she finds interesting in the passing crowds. When a boozy friend, Peter, hits her up at the local pub to sell an expensive golden conure parrot to a friend and split the take, Mina sees a chance to make some extra holiday cash and agrees, using Tim's hastily drawn map, to drive the parrot to the friend who lives in a desolate part of the Connemarre countryside. After getting helplessly lost, her car then stalls just outside a dense, dark winter forest. With night falling, one horrific shriek comes from the forest, and Mina, locking the doors, beds down in the car until morning. The next day Mina with the caged parrot traverses the cold, dark forest looking for help. As the short winter day begins to wane Mina sees a tall thin woman standing in an open lit doorway of a compound wildly gesturing for her to hurry. As she runs into the lit room and the woman slams and locks the door behind her, Mina will soon realize she has entered into the nightmare world of the watchers, underground monstrous forest creatures who come out at night looking for prey. She joins a ragtag group of two women and a young man all trapped in a compound that keeps them safely behind a lighted, glass partition away from the roaming packs of creatures outside. At night in the glaring room light the glass reflects their image back to them, but the creatures on the other side can see and watch them. Mina and the others have to now try to survive on what little food and water they can gather from the almost impenetrable forest during the day. But they must be back in the compound before the light comes on at night or meet a horrible fate outside. Answers to questions remain to be discovered about the origins of the compound and the underground creatures. And, can Mina and the others ever hope to escape the dark forest? Taking Irish folklore to a very dark place, A. M. Shine has written a horrifically creepy, fast paced, suspenseful tale that also includes some twists that catch the reader off-guard and leave a lasting impression.