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David Södergren

Autor von The Haar

9 Werke 203 Mitglieder 7 Rezensionen

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Beinhaltet die Namen: David Sodergren, David Södergren

Werke von David Södergren

The Haar 54 Exemplare
Maggie's Grave: A Horror Novel (2021) 37 Exemplare
Night Shoot: A Horror Novel (2019) 34 Exemplare
Dead Girl Blues (2020) 12 Exemplare
Satan's Burnouts Must Die! (2020) 8 Exemplare
The Navajo Nightmare (2021) 7 Exemplare
The Perfect Victim 2 Exemplare

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EllieBhurrut | Jan 24, 2024 |
Thanks for the goddamn nightmares

This needs to be a movie. Just when you think it can't get more upsetting, it does. Good lord what a ride.
 
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V.M.Sawh | 2 weitere Rezensionen | Nov 3, 2022 |
‘The Forgotten Island’ is a fun throwback to the kind of quick and nasty chiller that Richard Laymon write in the 80s. In fact if it had had a Steve Crisp cover and Californian leads in place of Scots and I might have been convinced I was reading a lost work from Laymon.

The book has a classic B-movie structure – a prologue set in the past where bad shit goes down and lots of people get messed up, followed by a skip forward to the present day and a slow build up to more bad shit going down. In this case the setting is a remote island in Thailand and the bad shit involves hordes of possessed Thai workers and giant creepy spider things.

The protagonist is Ana, a young woman with a troubled past who is on holiday in Thailand with her sister, Rachel, and Rachel’s dick of a boyfriend. Things start going wrong when the sisters wake up on a boat adrift in the ocean after a night of partying. When they end up coming aground on the mysterious island where the shit went down in the prologue it’s pretty obvious they’re going to go even wronger before long.

There’s a lot to enjoy here if you like simple, readable horror. David Sodergren writes gore really well (something that’s not easy to do) and keeps the story moving along at a decent pace. The characters are mostly fun too, from the slightly grumpy Scots to a couple of free living (and loving) hippies. It’s pretty broad brush stuff, and not what you’d call deep, but it works well in a low budget horror movie kind of a way.

There’s some sensitive handling of mental health issues along with the gore, and whilst most of the Thai characters are pretty weak, there is at least one fully rounded one in boat captain Chakrit. The slightly salacious use of sex in the book is a bit less palatable, with lots of leering men and a seemingly ever-present threat of sexual assault for the female characters. It’s something that was common in Laymon’s books, and it felt a bit dated here, but it didn’t intrude too much,

Overall then, this is a slight but entertaining piece of nastiness. It’s fast, ferocious fun, even if it isn’t going to win any awards for originality or depth.
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whatmeworry | 2 weitere Rezensionen | Apr 9, 2022 |
This review first appeared on scifiandscary.com - the author provided a copy for review consideration
Taken on its own terms, ‘Night Shoot’ is a masterpiece. It’s a book that sets out to capture the low rent, slightly sleazy, blood-soaked vibe of 1980s slasher movies and it does this quite brilliantly. As a teenager, my friends and I devoured this kind of film and revisiting the sub-genre, albeit in literary rather than cinematic form, was a lot of fun. Like many of the movies that inspired it, ‘Night Shoot’ is brief, graphic and creepy in a way that’s hard to put your finger on.
The story is classic slasher fare. A group of young people (film students in this case), travel to a remote location (a run-down Scottish mansion), take their clothes off and get bloodily murdered. They’re at the mansion to shoot a low budget horror movie, a theme which David Sodergren has a lot of fun with. He uses it to comment on horror movie tropes and the motivations of filmmakers, and it provides a credible reason for the characters to put themselves in harm’s way.
Lesbian prop designer Elspeth is a strong lead and far more fully formed than most of cinema’s final girls. Her battles with the other members of the crew as the plot builds up to the first killing are entertaining. She’s refreshingly modern, and I was pleased that Sodergren took the time to build her character rather than relying on genre stereotypes. I was rooting for her by the end, which made the second half of the book a genuinely tense experience.
Anyone who was a horror fan in the UK back then will know that half the fun was the hunt to find these films in their full, uncut form. Following the Video Nasties moral panic of the early 80s many horror films were only available in heavily censored versions (if at all). ‘Night Shoot’ is definitely uncensored. It’s incredibly graphic and Sodergren delights in finding creative ways to dispatch of his cast. I won’t give away the identity of the killer, but I will say that the denouement is enjoyably creepy and dark. The book is never exactly scary, but it is horrifying and disturbing. If that’s your bag I think you’ll have fun with it.
‘Night Shoot’ is a success then, but maybe not one for everyone. It’s a fast-paced nasty that’s true to its inspirations whilst not being afraid to criticise them. If you’re a fan of 80s slashers, you’ll probably love it. If not, your mileage may vary, but it’s still a solidly written and enjoyable chiller.


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whatmeworry | 2 weitere Rezensionen | Apr 9, 2022 |

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Statistikseite

Werke
9
Mitglieder
203
Beliebtheit
#108,639
Bewertung
3.8
Rezensionen
7
ISBNs
5
Sprachen
1

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