When I first picked this book up I had no clue that I was up for a sweet week or saucy reading full of believable characters, little town secrets and dark nasty things slithering in the dark. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that it also had some maniacs on the loose whose souls were blacker than that of the devil buried in the muddy pit and locals who grew up torturing each other under pretense of being holy. After sixty pages Jonathan Maberry became my new favorite author amongst masters of terror who grace my shelves and forever wedged himself into my memory. The things this man wrote were really good, he got into the minds of the bad characters the same way he worked the good souls, and the bad ones were truly evil, not afraid of death but like rock stars they were empowered by the rush walking the thin line between earth and the grave gave them.

The weeks leading to Halloween in Pine Deep were supposed to be filled with crisp weather, rich harvest of the golden fields and scary fun that was the main attraction for the tourists. Instead the crops went bad and terrors from the past came back to haunt our main characters; Malcolm Crow, Val Guthire and Terry Wolfe. Thirsty years ago they barely escaped with their lives, chased by a monstrous farmer, Ubel Griswold who seemed to be the devil himself covered in human flesh. He was stopped but even death didn't seem to hold him back because in present time their nightmares are coming back and his name is on the lips of three mad men who come crashing through the town. This time our friends are against something more than a mortal enemy but an entity whose powers are from another time and world and who will make sure that the whole town ceases to exist after Halloween. He will use his cronies, some who pretend to be friendly and wholesome and some who were freshly picked from the ground to do his bidding in the most gruesome way imaginable.

This is the first tale in the trilogy that has all ready enchanted me. Presently I am half way done reading the next book in the series and I can barely sit without jumping, this stuff gets very exciting. Maberry does a fantastic job creating characters that I care for and sadly, well excitingly I guess for me an even better job of destroying them one at a time. Luckily they are tough cookies and half the fun is reading how they fight evil, sometimes it takes one on one combat and other times it takes more of a mystical approach. "Ghost road blues" was so much more than pages filled with words, it was a tornado that sucks all my attention away and left me disheveled and hungry for more.

Great read and perfect for this time of year, happy Halloween!