Seed by Ania Ahlborn

source: purchased
title: Seed
author: Ania Ahlborn / Twitter
published: July 17th 2012
genre: horror
pages: 241
first line: The Saturn’s engine rattled like a penny in an old tin can.
rated: 4 out of 5 stars

blurb:
With nothing but the clothes on his back—and something horrific snapping at his heels—Jack Winter fled his rural Georgia home when he was still just a boy. Watching the world he knew vanish in a trucker’s rearview mirror, he thought he was leaving an unspeakable nightmare behind forever. But years later, the bright new future he’s built suddenly turns pitch black, as something fiendishly familiar looms dead ahead.

When Jack, his wife Aimee, and their two small children survive a violent car crash, it seems like a miracle. But Jack knows what he saw on the road that night, and it wasn’t divine intervention. The profound evil from his past won’t let them die…at least not quickly. It’s back, and it’s hungry; ready to make Jack pay for running, to work its malignant magic on his angelic youngest daughter, and to whisper a chilling promise: I’ve always been here, and I’ll never leave.

Country comfort is no match for spine-tingling Southern gothic suspense in Ania Ahlborn’s tale of an ordinary man with a demon on his back. Seed plants its page-turning terror deep in your soul, and lets it grow wild.

my thoughts:
After having read Brother by Ania Ahlborn this past October I knew I had to read more. I chose Seed because on reading the blurb it sounded terrifying . “Country comfort is no match for spine-tingling Southern gothic suspense in Ania Ahlborn’s tale of an ordinary man with a demon on his back.”

Was it scary? Yes. I read this one in two sittings. This was just good old fashioned horror. The story centers on Jack Winter who grew up poor in backwoods Georgia and left home at a very young age. He has not been back home since. Jack is now married and works a day job and is a musician as a side job with his best friend Reagan.

He and his wife Aimee live in Louisiana with their two young daughters Abigail and Charlotte. Charlotte is just 6 years old and Abby a few years older. Jack has carried a secret about his past with him his entire life and Aimee does not know something sinister about her husband. Jack himself has blocked most of the memories so there is always that feeling of secrets being kept by him without his even knowing what those secrets are. I liked that about his character, he was also watching things unravel alongside his family even though he was the one who brought it all on to begin with.

With nods to Stephen King and to The Exorcist, this was a really scary story that had me very creeped out. The author writes chilling scenes that left me wide eyed and afraid to turn the page. Also, when you add kids to the plot of horror novel, it tends to up the creepy factor.

“Jack was familiar with the feeling of something crawling across his skin-like a spider or a beetle. He’d lost countless nights of sleep to it as a kid. Every time he dozed off, something would scramble across his arm or slither down his back.”
p.93, Seed by Ania Ahlborn

While I really enjoyed this one, one thing I didn’t like was the hopelessness that permeated the story. If there is evil, there should also be good. I felt the author leaned so much towards the bad and it outshone and possibility of good. The ending was shocking and this was a twisted story about a little family who has a curse following them. I recommend it to fans of horror and the macabre.

About the author:
Born in Ciechanow Poland, Ania has always been drawn to the darker, mysterious, and sometimes morbid sides of life. Her earliest childhood memory is of crawling through a hole in the chain link fence that separated her family home from the large wooded cemetery next door. She’d spend hours among the headstones, breaking up bouquets of silk flowers so that everyone had their equal share.
Author of nine novels, Ania’s books have been lauded by the likes of Publisher’s Weekly, The New York Daily News, and The New York Times. Some titles have been optioned for film.
Hailing from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Ania currently lives in Greenville, South Carolina.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer: This review is my honest opinion. I did not receive any kind of compensation for reading and reviewing this book. I am under no obligation to write a positive review. I purchased my copy of Seed by Ania Ahlborn. Some of these links are affiliate links. The book photo is my own and not to be removed from this post.