Another brilliant book by the great Hunter Shea, this is the sort of book that makes a person fall in love with the horror genre, I got the same feeling as when I first started reading Stephen King all those years ago. There is that perfectly balanced blend of shock, violence, gore, tension and fear that makes reading a horror book so much fun. When you pick up a book by Shea you are guaranteed one of two things, full on B movie monster fun or a tear jerker of a plot that will leave you an emotional wreck…Faithless is right in the latter box.

The story starts with a priest stuck in a storm and hearing his family being murdered over the phone whilst he sits there helplessly listening, you’ve never met this family but already Shea is pulling at your heart-strings and making you feel the priest’s pain. The book then heads to a secluded farm house and a good old fashioned haunting. There are a lot of elements to this story, the investigation into who committed the deed, so many plot twists there, and then there are the events at the house, the tension gradually builds as events get more and more violent, you have Felix’s past and him coming to terms with having to do the right thing…and then you have the big reveal at the end, the sort of thing you stand no chance of guessing. One of the reasons why I loved this book so much was how I would hazard a guess at what was going on and Shea would laugh in my face and say I was way off before showing me just how wrong I was…My theory about bruiser was a good’un but I wasn’t even close.

There are only a few characters in the book but what we get are fantastic, Father Raul and his battles with his faith over what he has lost were really well written and Felix brought such a strong presence to scenes where the main character was falling apart and then there is Bruiser, Man! Bruiser rocked!

This is one fine horror novel by a writer who should be a household name, if you haven’t read anything by this guy then get off your butt and check out this book now.

Blog review: felcherman.wordpress.com/2021/10/25/faithless-by-hunter-shea/