I have been wanting to read this book for so long because Harrow Lake is considered to be such a classic horror/thriller story. And as I’m such a huge fan of the thriller/horror genre, I had to see what all the hype was about. However, I decided to listen to the audiobook as I’m really trying to up my audiobook game and I thought that listening to a horror/thriller book would be like listening to someone tell me a scary story around a campfire… and it did not disappoint.

Harrow Lake follows the story of Lola Nox, the daughter of a celebrated horror filmmaker, who believes nothing can scare her. But when her father is brutally attacked in their New York apartment, she's quickly packed off to live with a grandmother she's never met in Harrow Lake, the eerie town where her father's most iconic horror movie was shot. The locals are weirdly obsessed with the film that put their town on the map--and there are strange disappearances, which the police seem determined to explain away.

And there's someone--or some thing--stalking her every move. The more Lola discovers about the town, the more terrifying it becomes. Because Lola's got secrets of her own. And if she can't find a way out of Harrow Lake, they might just be the death of her.

So this story really has it all. A creepy monster, a haunted doll, a deranged grandmother, a missing, mentally unstable mother with an unclear motive for leaving, an egotistical film director as a father and an unsympathetic brute as her father’s aide. I absolutely loved the mix of characters that our protagonist meets during her stay in the creepy Harrow Lake. Some I liked and some I knew couldn’t be fully trusted.

There were also so many different components to the story that it made it SO interesting when they all came together at the end and how Kat Ellis excellently wound them all together to reveal the truth about what really happened to our main character’s mother. Alongside the Mr Jitters story (a truly terrifying tale about a man who got stuck under a landslide and feeds on the Harrow Lake town folk who dare to go in search of him) there is also a great story about a child whose childhood has been scarred by the unexplained disappearance of her mother and the distant and confusing love (if you can call it that) she receives from her father and the effect that has had on the person she has become. She consistently finds herself in dangerous situations because she is so desperate to find out the truth about her mother’s story. It was really sad in some parts that the refusal to tell Lola the truth about her mother was so detrimental in her developing into an adult and how that trauma shaped her understanding/memory of profound events in her life.

Overall I really enjoyed it and I thought it was the classic horror and thriller at its best. I would actually recommend the audiobook version too as it made the story so much scarier and creepier, so much so that as I was walking around my local park listening to it, I was constantly on edge! A classic horror read!

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