** spoiler alert ** As soon as I got a copy of Harbor in my hands, I immediately dove headfirst into it with an eager desire to be drawn into a very scary story. And at first, it did just that. I was captivated by the unfamiliar terrain and the feeling of sneakily peering into the lives of an insular community. The impossible disappearance of a little girl while vacationing with her parents immediately plunges the story into emotional turmoil, and the eerie happenings that follow when her father moves back to the island after trying unsuccessfully to drink himself in oblivion, fulfilled all my expectations. A creaking ice cream-man sign quickly became a part of my own nightmares... his ability to fit under any bed, under any door, was effortlessly built into a thing of terror. And the ocean... oh, the ocean. Already an intimidating thing to those of us who only visit it occasionally... but the idea of being at the mercy of an immense and unseeing, unthinking entity is chilling to say the least.

On the whole, I enjoyed the story tremendously. It is very different from any horror novel that I've read, but like a long drink of ice cold water tinged with salt, it was refreshing but not without a little regret. My small disappointments stemmed primarily from the structure of the story. The author interrupted the immediate story every few pages with incidents from the past that highlighted the weird history of the island community and occasional asides and memories of other characters. I felt that the abrupt switching and the new point of view brought me unwillingly out of the depths of the story when I should have been still completely immersed. Horror novels rely on building momentum to keep the reader propelled through to the end of the story, and this constant shifting felt like someone pumping the brakes every few miles. My only other complaint would be that some of the terror of the story was lost with two of the phantoms of the story. These frenemy ghosts are obsessed with a certain cult genre of music, and speak primarily in lyrics. I am myself familiar with the band, but apparently not thoroughly enough to understand all the references. No doubt this may delight many readers, but for me, much like a teenager making a faux-paus in front of their friends showing that they don't know about the new popular band, I found myself wanting to break out the full discography and bone up before I picked up the book again.

Any structural preferences aside, I would thoroughly recommend this novel for horror fans.