“Superstition also breeds in the forest.”

101. The Watchers – A.M. Shine

Ireland has some seriously angry fairy myths and seriously angry forest underground fairies, if several of the horror movies set there I’ve watched and this book are to be believed. The Watchers, which involves a forest where cars break down, motorbikes break down, heavy machinery breaks down, and if you make it to the right place, you can live through the night when that happens. It’s more likely you’ll be shredded by beastly fairies though. Way more likely. This would be why there are only four people and a golden conure in the “coop” as they call it.

Once you get beyond the day to day survival talk which is essentially the only stuff older woman Madeline talks about while she’s ordering people around, and the diet of berries mostly it seems, you realize how trapped you are. And under a scary bright light of all things. The watchers, who don’t get a real name, tend not to attack the coop as long as they can see the trapped people in the light at night. They don’t want them to sleep, so, not only has your transportation broken down – you now work nights without consenting to! And since I do work nights, my main issue with this was that no one addressed the consequences of not sleeping at night while also being awake during the day, Mina acted like she never slept and never needed to, liar. Thankfully, the action ramped up enough for me to stop being super concerned about it because the group did find a way to get a good night’s sleep before their escape attempt. That was necessary.

And once that action kicked in and they had finally watched an informational video, I mainly kept getting worried that the parrot would die a horrible death. I wasn’t sure how it was being fed because that kept getting not addressed at all and then I was worried about a revenge killing because it was a better judge of character than any of the people in the story. However, I can say that this was a quick reading story with absolutely no dead golden conures in it and a very creepy ending.

 

Murderface and Mortemer together in a flash of bright light when they were little, lucky for them this was an instant, not months of bright light while under the watch of monsters.