John Hunt knocks this one out of the park. Great read. This is definitely one of the best books that I've read this year. Never a dull moment reading this. The ending just a shocking twist. I highly recommend this one.

Fat boy Taylor has lost his mom and his friends. What could be worse? He finds out as he’s chased by The Tracker. The book moved at a frenetic pace,but to me just didn’t seem to go anywhere. The pure evil might be a literary technique that some will enjoy, but not this reader.

Good fast paced book. Had read several books by this author and have enjoyed them all. Highly recommend.

The Tracker is a horror novel that will leave a lasting impression. It gets pretty gruesome and violent. The story begins innocently enough, but soon evil things begin to happen.

Taylor is a 25-year-old man who lives with his mother. Both he and his mother are overweight. She is apparently quite large and moved into the garage at their home because she feared that, if she died, they would need a crane to get her out. One day, Taylor finds that she has died of a heart attack. After her funeral, weird things begin to happen to him. He begins to lose whole days, not remembering what he did or where he went. He begins to see a mysterious, shadowy man stalking him. Eventually, the shadow man reveals himself. He is some sort of demon called a Tracker. This is because he can place some sort of worm inside Taylor’s body that allows him to find Taylor.

Taylor is given 48 hours to evade the Tracker. If he does not get away, the Tracker threatens to eat him. (The Tracker has huge, sharp, shark-like teeth.) So, Taylor goes on the run for a couple days. Over those days, much violence and murder ensues. Taylor eventually turns himself in to the police, but can they protect him?

The pace of the novel is quite fast. Events happen in a flurry and Taylor’s time on the run passes quickly. There is not a lot of time spent on character development of the other people in the story. Taylor is the main focus. We see his story unfolding through the narrative and his inner thoughts and memories. He had a very traumatic thing happen in his past and it is the source of many of his problems.

There was a drastic switch to the tone of the story after Taylor tells Owen, the police detective, his side of the story. Suddenly, the reader is left questioning Taylor’s whole tale. That’s where things begin to ramp up.

If you don’t mind graphic descriptions of extreme, gory and gruesome violence, you will like this novel. It’s a pretty gritty horror story with plenty of gruesome scenes to make you fear things that go bump in the night. If you like being scared, read this one at night, in the dark, while the wind howls outside. That will set the mood quite well and send shivers up your spine.

"I never want to hear mention of bolt-cutters, a live rat and a bucket in the same sentence again. EVER."

If you start a novel on Saturday and finish it the following day, in my book, that guarantees a big five HorrorTalk stars. It is totally exhilarating to start a book you know nothing about, never having read the author before, beginning with mixed expectations, but then find it so damned good it was almost impossible to put down. Make no bones about it, John Hunt’s “The Tracker” did exactly that for me. It knocked me out, and that’s very hard to do.

I’m going to deliberately limit the plot details as it is very easy to give unnecessary spoilers. The best way forward is to approach it the way I did, and that’s by going in totally blind. The novel opens with a guy called Taylor walking into a police station to hand himself over to the law, as he knows the police are hunting for him. During his interrogation it is revealed he is the chief suspect for four brutal murders. Much of the first half of the book is told via the interrogation between the detective Owen and Taylor, who of course, claims he did not commit the killings. He does admit he was present when all four occurred and to the police looks guilty as sin. The book then enters flash-back mode and Taylor’s retelling begins right after the death of his mother when sinister shadow begins to stalk him and there begins a horrific game of cat and mouse between this supernatural being and Taylor. Of course, nobody believes him.

To say anything more specific about the plot would ruin the surprises, and there are plenty of those on offer. It really is a book of two halves, both of which are equally great, and I thought I knew where the second stanza was heading, but was completely wrong footed. Although the violence is sporadic some of the kill scenes were particularly brutal, realistic and handled beautifully by the author.

When the massively overweight Taylor, and weight is a key element of the story, is being relentlessly stalked by ‘The Tracker’ of the title the story did remind me a little of the film ‘It Follows’, as the thing always knows where he is. Read the book to find out why. Before long Taylor is running for his life and the balance between flashbacks and the sequences in the police station are well balanced as the body count increases.

“The Tracker” is a very easy and addictive novel to read, and I’m sure in the right hands could be turned into a terrific low budget film. It’s neither deep, long, or over-complicated and in its 182 pages throws the kitchen sink at the bruised reader with plenty of fun twists along the way. You’re not going to have to think too much, but I still enjoyed the ambiguity on offer as it hurtled towards its conclusion, and that’s the beauty of this type of entertainment. In my old age I’ve got squeamish, so I don’t ever want to hear of bolt-cutters, a live rat and a bucket in the same sentence again, that was truly nasty. And I mean NEVER EVER AGAIN. This is brutal pulp horror, with a terrific story thrown into the mix, which I am delighted to award five blood soaked stars. I’m going to have to investigate John Hunt further.