REVIEW: Dark Water Sacrifice by Zach Lamb
Dark Water Sacrifice
A parent’s guilt. Desperate choices. The ultimate cost.
The dark water has always called to the Blackwell family.
Devastated by the loss of his daughter, Adam Blackwell flees his hometown of Scarsville, Georgia.
Something lurks beneath the churning black waters, and its patience is running out.
Two years later, his father is dead and has left him everything, including the lake where Adam’s daughter drowned. Now, Adam must return to the last place he ever wanted to go and settle the affairs of the man he blames for everything.
The time has come for the next sacrifice, and it will stop at nothing.
Adam believes it will be a short trip to get the house ready for sale. But the closer he gets to the lake, the more memories return from the worst day of his life.
Living in the past is dangerous, but there is nowhere to hide when the past comes back for you.
Staying in the family home, Adam hears small footsteps in the dark. Soon after, he hears the voice of his daughter. She wants him to join her in the depths of the black lake.
When the waters rise, Adam must decide whether he will begin the slow process of healing and somehow find peace between the world of the living and the dead—or become the next Dark Water Sacrifice…
MY REVIEW:
It’s not often that I don’t like the protagonist of a story yet I stay with them to the bitter end. Adam, the anti-hero of this chilling tale does himself no favours with his endless avoidance tactics and acting out. He's all too flawed and that's what makes him relatable.
What also kept me reading was the protean nature of Adam’s enemy and the way it possessed various characters to torment him. Doubtless Carl Jung would have had something to say about how primal fears express themselves through myth and legend - this story plays deliciously into that concept.
I also liked its evocation of a certain sort of America, cut off, unsophisticated, a law unto itself. This is geography explored by the Coen brothers to great effect. Adam, the country boy who escaped to the cosmopolitan city to be a writer, returns to face the music and a cast of ex-wives, friends, enemies and ghosts, many of whom have a surprising amount of sympathy for our resentful hero. He has the quality of drawing in other people to his own needs, despite his dysfunctional inability to respond to the needs of others.
My only cavil is that the female characters were less nuanced than the male ones. Loving Adam is no guarantee of their survival. The exception is Adam’s daughter, Grace, who embodies all of her feckless father's fears and self-hatred. There may be something horribly mysterious in the lake but sometimes the real monsters are on land.
Author Bio:
Zach Lamb is a fictionist who creates thriller, horror and dark fiction stories. He is the author of The Suicide Killer and Dark Water Sacrifice. Zach has an MFA in creative writing from Southern New Hampshire University. He lives with his wife and kids in the non-fictional town of Ellerslie, Georgia, named after the fictional character Captain Ellerslie from the Waverley Novels.
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