Blog Tour and Review of Hydra by Matt Wesolowski
Hydra by Matt Wesolowski - blog tour and my Review:
I'm delighted to take part in the Random Things blog Tour today for the second book in the Six Stories Series by Matt Wesolowski.
Published by the magnificent Orenda books it is a crepy and menacing thriller.
My Review:
This second book in Matt Wesolowski’s six stories series is equally as sinister and creepy as the original Six Stories his first novel.
Written in the form of a podcast, featuring a series of six interviews each looking at the same story from a different perspective. The narrator is Scott King whose Investigative style of journalism leads him to revisit past crimes and take a fresh look at what really happened.
Each crime he rehashes has distinctly sinister connotations and Hydra is creepy and menacing from the outset. He is granted the privilege of interviewing a notorious criminal Arla McLeod, now incarcerated in a Mental Health institution where she has languished since the night a few years ago when at the age of just 21 she massacred her entire family by bludgeoning them to death with a hammer.
As if that’s not dark and macabre enough we are treated to the circumstances around this murder in small doses, interspersed with fractured memories of encounters with Black eyed Kids (a real internet phenomenon apparently, which makes the scary even more terrifying)
Then the journalist continues to present episodes of his podcast assisted by interviews with folk who knew Arla, when she was a child, at school and in her teenage years when she was an emo fan of a cult music artiste going by the name of Skexxixx.
That Arla was a troubled youngster is never in any doubt but as her past is revealed by people who knew her and by Arla herself it also become clear that unpleasant occurrences throughout her formative years play a large part in how and why she became the way she did and the horrible crime which occurred.
Each time we revisit the same event, the same period of time, yet viewed from a different position by a different person and all the stories have one common thread, that of something nasty, something dark and something very, very, scary going on around Arla.
Scott King uses his skills as a journalist to winkle out truths people don’t really want to speak about as he pieces together what is a gruesome and sinister tale.
And then he begins to receive threats …
The story is a real creeper, in that it creeps up and scares you and is also creepy and frightening with a real sense of horror and a unique tension created by the retelling of an event over and over yet never revealing quite the same facts and all the time the dark eyed kids watch from the sidelines. Brrr it’s enough to make you shiver.
This is one to read with the lights on, to make sure theres nothing lurking in the corners of the room. A delectable masterpiece of bone chilling ghoulishness that will keep you flipping those pages until the bitter end.
The Author
Matt Wesolowski is from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in the UK. He is an English tutor for young people in care.
Matt started his writing career in horror, and his short horror fiction has been published in numerous UK- and US-based anthologies such as Midnight Movie Creature Feature, Selfies from the End of the World, Cold Iron and many more.
His novella, The Black Land, a horror set on the Northumberland coast, was published in 2013. Matt was a winner of the Pitch Perfect competition at Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Festival in 2015. His debut thriller, Six Stories, was an Amazon bestseller in the USA, Canada, the UK and Australia, and a WHSmith Fresh Talent pick, and film rights were sold to a major Hollywood studio..
The Blurb:
bludgeoned her mother, stepfather and younger sister to death with a hammer, in an unprovoked attack
known as the Macleod Massacre. Now incarcerated at a medium-security mental-health institution, Arla will
speak to no one but Scott King, an investigative journalist, whose Six Stories podcasts have become an
internet sensation.
King finds himself immersed in an increasingly complex case, interviewing five key witnesses and Arla herself,
as he questions whether Arla’s responsibility for the massacre was as diminished as her legal team made out.
As he unpicks the stories, he finds himself thrust into a world of deadly forbidden ‘games’, online trolls, and the mysterious black-eyed kids, whose presence seems to extend far beyond the delusions of a
murderess…
Dark, chilling and gripping, Hydra is both a classic murder mystery and an up-to-the-minute, startling thriller that shines light in places you may never, ever want to see again.
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