Will Haunt You

Rating: 3/5 creepy books

You know how in a lot of horror movies, there’s the one skeptic who doesn’t believe in the supernatural, so they taunt it, only to be the one killed in the most gruesome way? The Will Haunt You book jacket makes readers not want to tempt this potentially supernatural book. (See photo.)

Will Haunt You tells the story of former musician Jesse Wheeler. Years ago, Jesse came home drunk after a gig, and his son suffered a serious, life-altering injury while Jesse should have been watching him. That event was a wake-up call, and Jesse has been sober for years.

Jesse performs with his band after a long hiatus and manages to stay sober, despite pressure from his bandmates. He acts as designated driver for one of his bandmates, but what should have been an ordinary drive became something much more sinister.

A weird radio station he’s listening to on the drive seems to know exactly what Jesse is up to, and the car clock is stuck on midnight for what feels like ages. His car stalls and two cops appear. But something feels off…it quickly becomes clear that the cops are not there to help.

This begins Jesse’s haunting. He ends up in what initially looks like a hospital but is quickly revealed to be his own unique personal hell. He is forced to confront his demons, and just when he thinks things cannot get worse, they do. Someone knows his secrets and is using them to terrify him.

All of this is happening to Jesse because he read Will Haunt You, and anyone who reads the book becomes a part of the book’s sinister plans. Brian Kirk tells Jesse’s story of being tortured and manipulated by evil masterminds, and Kirk warns the reader that a similar fate awaits us if we continue reading. At the beginning of the book, Kirk effectively creeps out the reader by telling us that we’re next and there’s no way out.

But it’s Kirk’s promises that we’d be haunted that led the book to fall flat. The scariest element of the book is that we are next, but much of the book didn’t reference that. It’s a risky choice to break the fourth wall, but if an author’s going to do it, it needs to really draw the reader in and make an essential element of the book. It felt like it was randomly peppered in throughout the book to scare readers. The book focused mostly on what was happening to Jesse, and it felt like the fourth wall broke when Jesse’s torture got a little mundane.

Kirk does a fantastic job building suspense, but often, nothing happens with that feeling. After something bad happened, Jesse would allude to things getting much worse than they just were, which is a fantastic way to pique readers’ interest, but the worse thing was often a letdown, and I found myself left with excitement that had nowhere to go.

While this book definitely has elements that are creepy, more needed to be done to pull the reader in and make the book more immersive. The reader involvement needs to feel more engrained within the book rather than being used as a crutch to make the book feel scarier.