Bellmere Common is horrific, gory and engrossing.
I read a lot of books of all genres with my favourites being horror and thrillers so when I read the blurb about Bellmere Common by Mark Steen I couldn’t wait to start reading it (I even put down my Stephen King novel to do so)!
Bellmere Common is a sleepy village in England and after Pat’s Aunt Jeanette (who he never knew existed) dies and leaves him the house he and his family travel down from Manchester to sort out the house ready to sell it. But the village has a horrible past with murders and disappearances and secrets about Aunt Jeanette that Pat and his family never knew.
A demon is on the loose in Bellmere Common and looking for souls to feed the devil and now Pat and his family are in a fight for survival.
Overall I found Bellmere Common to be a good story, horrific, gory and engrossing. While I enjoyed reading it I did have several problems with it;
Firstly the book is littered with spelling and grammatical errors, some of which are so glaringly obvious and some that change the meaning of what the author is trying to say.
Secondly I thought that at times the author was trying to increase the word count by unnecessarily over-describing mundane paragraphs, for instance when Mary makes a cup of tea for the two teenagers that she is planning to offer as a sacrifice to her master describing how to make a cup of tea added nothing to the story and was pointless.
At some points I had to re-read some parts as they didn’t seem to fit with the story and maybe if they had been introduced earlier it would have worked better.
So for a debut novel by the author it is a good story that I would recommend reading, despite my niggles as mentioned above. I think if the book was re-edited and proofread better it would make for a much better, polished novel.
But as I said, I enjoyed reading it and am glad I did but definitely in need of re-editing especially if the author wants to make a career of writing novels.
Rating: 3.5/5
RRP: £10.99 (Paperback) / £0.99 (Kindle)
Available to buy from Amazon here.
