A demonic invasion takes over the British Isles and threatens the entire world.
Darrows Glen was a peaceful little Irish town – until the demons invaded. Beings with wings, horns, and an insatiable appetite for sadism and destruction are pouring through into Ireland, and they aren’t stopping there. Pretty soon, the whole of the British Isles is under their control, and the British people are trapped amidst hordes of ravening monsters who threaten to spread to the rest of the world. The peacenik American President has to decide whether to send troops, the French President wants to seal off the Channel and keep the horror – and the British people – trapped abroad, while the British prime minister must choose between abandoning her people or putting the rest of the world at risk. Meanwhile, refugees and hostages must fight for survival in a world gone, literally, Hellish.
LAKE OF FIRE is not for the squeamish – it is a gruesome, graphic horror novel that does not pull punches. There are some beautifully spine-chilling moments, like the scene in a jail cell where a shadow suddenly changes shape and begins to move. Through it all, the characters’ essential humanity comes through, particularly those engaged in fighting directly for their lives. People react as people do – some finding strength in protecting others, some seeking to preserve what little order they can at any cost, some giving in to despair and fear. Relationships form and are dissolved amidst the chaos, and some good people fall apart while some of the people who initially seem most despicable and hopeless develop redeeming characteristics. The use of the present tense throughout adds immediacy and a sense of ongoing tension.
The action, though, while immediate and frantic, doesn’t actually seem to move the plot forward much. The reader is given plenty of visions of horrible suffering and torture, combined with people trying to figure out what to do about it or how to escape it – enough so that the horror starts to feel routine, even dull. However, the book seems to reach a stalemate rather quickly and mostly remains there. There are too many characters going in too many different directions for a coherent plot, and not much in the way of bringing the divergent plotlines together. Hopefully, this will all be handled in a sequel, but this is a rather long book for so little resolution. The author uses odd accents, particularly for the Irish characters, that sometimes get in the way of understanding what they’re saying and sometimes feel almost infantile, as in the use of “dis”, “sometin” and “nuffin” for “this,” “something” and “nothing,”. Sentence phrasing is awkward in places: “…she looks at her and expresses solely an innate amity that goes beyond words…”, for example.
LAKE OF FIRE revels in the gruesome, nightmare-inducing hordes of demons it unleashes.
~IndieReader.