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The Boy Who Drew Monsters

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The Boy Who Drew Monsters

By: Keith Donohue
Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
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About this listen

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Stolen Child comes a hypnotic literary horror novel about a young boy trapped inside his own world, whose drawings blur the lines between fantasy and reality.

Ever since he nearly drowned in the ocean three years earlier, 10-year-old Jack Peter Keenan has been deathly afraid to venture outdoors. Refusing to leave his home in a small coastal town in Maine, Jack Peter spends his time drawing monsters. When those drawings take on a life of their own, no one is safe from the terror they inspire. His mother, Holly, begins to hear strange sounds in the night coming from the ocean, and she seeks answers from the local Catholic priest and his Japanese housekeeper, who fill her head with stories of shipwrecks and ghosts. His father, Tim, wanders the beach, frantically searching for a strange apparition running wild in the dunes. And the boy's only friend, Nick, becomes helplessly entangled in the eerie power of the drawings. While those around Jack Peter are haunted by what they think they see, only he knows the truth behind the frightful occurrences as the outside world encroaches upon them all.

In the tradition of The Turn of the Screw, Keith Donohue's The Boy Who Drew Monsters is a mesmerizing tale of psychological terror and imagination run wild, a perfectly creepy listen for a dark night.

©2014 Keith Donohue (P)2014 Blackstone Audio
Genre Fiction Ghosts Horror Literary Fiction Psychological Haunted Scary Fiction

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All stars
Most relevant  
I listen to the vast majority of my audiobooks at night, before I go to bed. This is the first time one has given me nightmares, two days running!!! I'm either a big Betty or this is very scary!

A family in a remote Maine fishing town is trying to cope with a troubled son, who since a near fatal drowning, has become extremely agrophobic. As winter brings more calamitous weather, residents report sightings of a white Hound of the Baskervilles and a strange albino man.

Are these sightings part of a cabin fever town-wide paranoia or is it something to do with the numerous scary drawings the son has been squirreling away?

Freakout!

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The premise of the story seemed really unusual and suitably creepy, along with the idyllic setting of a beach house in Maine it looked like it could be a delightful scare. Sadly the promise just didn't deliver - if you are suitably terrified by a naked tramp and a white dog, knock yourself out - but if you're made of slightly sterner stuff, download Dark Matter or The Waiting Room instead.
The narrator does a passably job but as the story drags through the middle of the book he also loses the will to live. He narrates the Japanese housekeeper, Mrs Teramaku well but it seems slightly strange that he gave a New England doctor almost the same accent!
The twist at the end is quite clever but at that point I just felt so 'meh' about the characters, the story and the outcome that it only warranted the merest raising of eyebrows.

Disappointing

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