‘Tower Hill’ – Sarah Pinborough

I’ve read some horrifying stuff over the last week so it seemed strangely apt that I get back into the normal swing of things by reading some horror fiction and Sarah Pinborough’s ‘Tower Hill’ seemed like a good place to start.
There seems to be a rule of horror fiction stating that the quieter a locale is, the more likely it is that something truly evil and terrifying is going to take place. The small American town of Tower Hill seems to be the quietest and most easy going, town in horror fiction so it’s pretty clear right from the start that something big is going to happen! Two men arrive in Tower Hill, not normally something noteworthy but they killed a priest and blew up a Burger King on the way. Now the town has a new priest as well as a new professor at the college and students from the college are beginning to die… Artefacts of great power lie within Tower Hill and Godhood awaits those who are willing to take the risk. Or does it? The stakes are much higher than anyone seems to realise…
‘Tower Hill’ is a genuinely creepy novel of a town that gradually falls under supernatural control and the consequences of this. The tension builds up on each page as the situation grows worse and the few unaffected people find the odds are stacked more and more against them. Pinborough has a real knack for reeling the reader in with the promise of hope and then throwing a curveball that puts everything into doubt again. Even though the storyline could be quite predictable in this way (I came to expect it after a while) it was the character’s reactions, in the face of fear, that really drove things along. A real mixture of fear and heroism, especially in the case of Deputy Sheriff Eccles. This approach also throws up a real sense of inevitability that can make things predictable (as mentioned) but also really adds to the creeping sense of horror that pervades this book. There’s nothing here that will make you jump but there was plenty to give me that sick feeling you get when you know something bad is going to happen and there is nothing that you can do…
After all this horror goodness (a couple of scenes laid on the gore in a particularly nasty way!) it was a shame to see the book end in the way that it did. Without giving too much away there’s an emphasis placed on ‘random chance that is really fate’ that came across (to me at least) like a get out of jail free card. There’s also the fact that while our heroes were labouring in ignorance for most of the book they managed to find out what they needed to know just in time for the final confrontation… I can see how this could happen but maybe it would have been a more effective tactic to let the tension stretch out just a little bit further…
‘Tower Hill’ is let down by its ending but is still a gripping page turner full of creeping dread. Sarah Pinborough has done enough to make sure that I’ll be looking out for more her books in the future.

Seven and Three Quarters out of Ten