It's been a few years, I've tried several times to get into this book thinking perhaps my timing wasn't right. I loved all Brogden's other work but just cannot get into this one.
DNF at 25%

A struggle to persevere with and get to the finish line and to be honest, it wasn't worth it to me.
Bone Harvest seemed to try to cover too much ground and it does so messily. Which is a shame as it sounded like a great horror read - I was intrigued to get it read but ultimately disappointed although I think other horror fans will devour it. Despite my disappointment, it definitely left a lasting impression as I expected nothing of what happened.

Archived before I could download and read, so I don't have an opportunity to say anything about this book

The key words for this novel are: Ritual sacrifice, cannibalism, cults, dementia and Great Dane. To be honest what more do you want in a book, seriously?
In “Bone Harvest” James Brogden has created a terrific and horrific folk horror filled with ritual killings and cannibalism. It’s a bold choice by Brogden featuring a protagonist with dementia, but he pulls it off with his excellent and compassionate writing. All in all, it is a tense and well written horror tale.

James Brogden is one of my favourite horror authors – I love his special brew of folklore-infused storytelling, and Bone Harvest continues that trend with a batsh*t crazy plot that constantly branches in unexpected directions.

Part One, which begins in the hellish trenches of the First World War, is a gut-wrenching short story in and of itself. From there, we jump forward to present day to meet Dennie, an allotment owner in a sleepy town who begins to suspect something's amiss when newcomers arrive.

Although I felt the multiplying POV shifts in the second half of the book somewhat detracted attention away from Dennie (whom I loved), as a whole, this was a cracking read with horror imagery that is now burned into my retinas. Can't wait to see what Mr Brogden comes up with next.

YOU SHALL REAP WHAT YOU SOW

Struggling with the effects of early-onset Alzheimer’s, Dennie Keeling leads a quiet life. Her husband is dead, her children are grown, and her best friend, Sarah, was convicted of murdering her abusive husband. All Dennie wants now is to be left to work her allotment in peace.

But when three strangers take the allotment next to hers, Dennie starts to notice strange things. Plants are flowering well before their time, shadowy figures prowl at night, and she hears strange noises coming from the newcomers’ shed. Dennie soon realises that she is face to face with an ancient evil – but with her Alzheimer’s steadily getting worse, who is going to believe her?

When things feel a bit grim, which they often do at the moment, I seek out the soothing balm of my favourite genre, horror. Perhaps it’s because I take some small degree of comfort knowing that fictional characters are suffering far worse than I am.

If you had told me a week ago that I would be writing a review about a horror novel that has a large chunk set on an allotment, I would have been dubious at best. Turns out that my uncertainty was entirely unfounded. This week’s review, Bone Harvest by James Brogden, is the story of a sinister religious cult moving into a quiet rural community, bringing their own unique brand of evil.

It’s not often that you get quite so much backstory when it comes to the villain in a novel. The first quarter of the novel doesn’t feature the main character at all* but follows a fellow who goes by the name of Everett as he flees the horrors of the First World War. Escaping the trenches, Everett finds himself falling in with the members of a strange church, the followers of Moccus. They are a beguiling bunch, led by a charismatic figure known as Mother, they worship a deity far older than any organised religion. To Everett, this strange group offer the chance of security, wealth, long life and all the trappings that come with it. He is able to forget his past and not worry about being branded a coward or a deserter. It becomes clear that Everett has only a passing relationship with concepts like bravery, honour and self-sacrifice. These initial chapters flesh out what drives this man to commit some unspeakable acts.

After many decades, the increasingly desperate cult ends up in a small village where they cross paths with indomitable Dennie Keeling.

Dennie has reached an age where her allotment has become her entire world. Widowed and living alone, she takes solace in tending her little patch of land. Not used to change, when new neighbours appear her innate curiosity is immediately piqued. There is a bittersweet quality to Dennie’s character I really liked. She is suffering from a degenerative condition and you know that ultimately there will be no happy ending for her. This adds a real sense of grim determination to her every action. Dennie is in a literal race against time. Part of her knows that eventually she will be incapable of stopping Mother and Everett. Indecision is not an option, Dennie has no choice but to act. I found myself willing her on every step of the way. Neighbours and other allotment owners are quite happy to dismiss the “slightly loopy old dear” but she refuses to quit. Be warned, it makes the final perfectly judged chapters quite the emotional gut punch.

As an aside, Viggo is a bit of a special character as well. I’ll offer no further spoilers, you can discover him for yourself.

It’s funny the places reading can take you sometimes. Brogden’s novel got me thinking about my maternal grandmother. She passed away from Alzheimer’s many years ago, and I found myself picturing Dennie very much like her. Also, Nan was an avid reader of genre fiction. I’ve never known anyone who could devour a paperback as quickly as she could. It was her that got me interested in horror at a young age, probably too young if I am being entirely honest. She introduced me to the likes of James Herbert and Graham Masterton and Brogden’s writing has a similar unnerving quality reminiscent of both those writers. Initially everything appears blissfully normal but the deeper you dig into the narrative the more ominous events become. I can guarantee my gran would have loved Bone Harvest**, it’s the quintessential British rural idyll gone horribly wrong. This is exactly the sort of thing she would thrust into my hands and demand I read as soon as possible. Mamie had impeccable taste when it came to a good story.

Bone Harvest ended up being a uniquely personal experience for me. I’ve not read any of James Brogden’s other novels, but based on how thought-provoking this turned out to be I need to remedy that situation sharpish. If you are looking for a horror read with a great story and some fascinating characters, then Bone Harvest is the novel for you.

Regular readers of my book related waffle know I like to recommend music that I think fits the novel I’ve just read/reviewed and this case is no exception. A malevolent and brooding novel needs a suitably malevolent and brooding soundtrack to accompany it. The good news is that I have found what I think is a good candidate. Boar by Mark Smythe is menacing and just the right side of creepy enough to keep you slightly unsettled while listening. If that isn’t the ideal pairing, then I don’t know what is.

Bone Harvest is published by Titan Books and is available now. Highly recommended.

*I’ll even go so far as to admit that at one point I was unsure if I was reading the correct book or not. I was reading an electronic review copy and I thought I had downloaded the wrong file. That said, Everett’s story is so utterly engrossing so I didn’t mind in the slightest.

**Trust me, this is the highest praise I can give any horror novel. If it would have got her seal approval it is a winner.

My thanks to Titan Books for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘Bone Harvest’ by James Brogden in exchange for an honest review.

“You Shall Reap What You Sow” - cover tag line.

This horror novel opens in 1915 in No Man’s Land as a young deserter takes the identity of Everett, a dead soldier. He is looking for a group of rogue deserters known as the Grey Brigade. Aside from deserters they are cannibals and yes, they happily chomp down on recently deceased soldiers.

One member, Bill, claims to belong to an ancient religion that continues the worship of Moccus, the Celtic boar deity (He who eats the Moon). When Everett expresses interest in converting, Bill advises that he should go to the village of Swinley in Shropshire where his god walks and “put his case directly”. Bill dies shortly after this.

Everett does as suggested and ends up taking Bill’s role as the butcher, who sacrifices the offerings of the Farrow. The cult confers longevity and health on its devotees. The sacrificial cycle is every 26 years and the deserter is sent away to then return for the next cycle. After popping in to visit Everett in other cycles, we move forward to 1994.

Everett and his lady, Ardwyn, have decided that the cult needs a new direction and rather than sacrificing boars to Moccus, they want to return to the old ways of human sacrifice. This angers the Mother of the Farrow and they are sent away. Flash forward to 2020 and they return to find Swinley closed to them so they steal two sacred objects and seek a new home.

In the village of Dodbury sixty-five year old Dennie is concerned that she is experiencing the early stages of dementia. She loves working on her allotment yet is a little put out by a new couple, who are taking over one of the allotments. Something feels off about them and then a few people in the village go missing. Cue sinister music!

This was brilliant. An old-fashioned (in a good way) English folk horror with a fantastic lead in Dennie, who on occasion sees the ghost of Sarah, a friend who committed suicide in prison after killing her abusive husband. Dennie also has a loyal Great Dane named Viggo. Both Sarah and Viggo serve to warn and protect Dennie.

The baddies appear on the surface to be quite pleasant Millennials and yet we know how dangerous they actually are. It’s not long until they are enticing locals into their cult, some as potential new members and others as sacrificial vessels.

This was a fascinating novel that had me on the edge-of-my-seat as the tension continued to ramp up. In addition, the characters are well realised. It’s a visceral horror novel so quite gruesome in places.

I thought it was excellent and now want to read more of Brogden’s work.

Highly recommended for lovers of the horror genre.

It's a powerful, gripping and entertaining story, well written and well plotted.
It starts slowly, with a lot of word building and the introduction of parts of the characters. Even if there's plenty to consider them the "vilain" of the story you cannot help liking them with all their faults and sins.
The second part alternates descriptions of the life in an english village with building the suspense and an underlying sense of darkness.
The "good guys" are nice and you cannot help rooting for them.
I can say that somehow the first part is stronger than the second but I liked them both nonetheless.
I appreciated the style of writing, the pace that is never too fast and builds the tension.
It was a good read, recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

All I can say after this one, is wow!! What did I just read?! The blurb had lured me into a sense of what this book was like, but it was so very much more than that. From the opening sequence to the final pages, I was captivated by this bizarre and horrifying tale.

I feel as though to talk about the plot would ruin it for anyone who choses to read this ahead of picking up the book. As with most horrors, it's best to go in blind with very little knowledge of the subject. The calm and calculated nature of the writing, really added to the suspense and allowed a delightfully slow build up of tension. You are never really sure what is going to happen in the next paragraph, as the horrific elements are carefully intersected with talk about allotments, tea and cake.

Brogden captured the essence of a small British village perfectly. From the bored, self-indulgent teens, to the village scandal, it all felt very true to how events would go down if something like this genuinely happened. Combined with the slow burning tale, it reminded me of classic British horror movies. All it really needed as the cherry on top was a creepy soundtrack playing as I read.

Altogether a great read, with some very strange and twisted elements to satisfy horror fans. I did also giggle to myself a few times that actual 2020 has turned out to be even more crazy and messed up than the one seen in James Brogden's story. Particularly when the VE day celebrations were mentioned!

Although I had previously read two other novels by James Brogden, Bone Harvest blew those other efforts out of the water and although it was a meaty 500-pager, it really whizzed past. Neither was it a fast-paced novel, but that is no criticism, as it had a certain easy-going style which truly sucked me in. After I had eaten up the first 100-pages I was struck by how much I was enjoying the dark and meandering story. The experience was heightened by the fact that I knew very little about the plot in advance, so to avoid spoilers I am going to remain vague and refer to some of the plot shifts out of context. It is a brilliant book which is incredibly well plotted, and if you are into ancient cults, conspiracies, and gardening this might be a book for you.

Gardening. Yes, you read that right. Bizarrely, a lot of the story is set around a plot of village allotments and you may wonder whether it is possible to build a horror novel around potato, cabbage, and tomato patches? It sounds impossible, but somehow James Brogden pulls it off and there are some bizarre scenes as the mystery deepens around a garden shed hiding a nasty secret On a couple of occasions, I almost expected Inspector Barnaby from Midsummer Murders to appear and take over the investigation!

In the pivotal allotment storyline Dennie Keeling leads a quiet life and spends most of her time on her plot, suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s, on occasions she even sleeps in her shed and is accompanied by her huge Great Dane hound. Dennie is a prickly character, a busybody who knows everybody’s business and the story begins to develop when she suspects the new allotment tenants, an otherwise friendly young couple, are up to no good and she is particularly suspicious of them because they’re renting an allotment patch with a history none of the locals likes to talk about. Dennie’s Alzheimer’s worsens as the story progresses, fused with her guilt for something else, result in some of the strongest scenes in the book. Even the dog Viggo was a great character.

Although the Dennie Keeling story takes place in 2020, it takes its time reaching that point and begins in the trenches of the first world war, with a British deserter, turned cannibal, who is told by a fellow deserter to find a tiny English village which follows an ancient cult, which is as far away from Christianity as you can get. This man embraces this new way of life with both hands and before long is embraced by the strange cult as one of their own. Written in the third person, the cult plays a big part of the story and this part of the story is truly fascinating, making a bizarre contrast with the pottering around on the village allotments.

The cult is so well developed and cleverly presented it was truly fascinating and spread over a century the reader gets a genuine sense of how it grew, moved with the times with the various time jumps throughout the 20th Century leading us to 2020. James Brodgen obviously spent a lot of time researching and creation a believable alternative pre-Christianity type of religion, which had survived so long because it deliberately flew under the radar and was very selective with who it recruited. This was a major strength of the book but to avoid spoilers you can discover exactly how the cult works by reading it yourself.

I came very close to giving this 5/5 stars, however, the reason it dropped half a star was because it lacked scares and because the reader spends so much time in the company of the cult I did not dislike them in the way that I probably should have. In actual fact, I rather liked both cult leaders and the youngster they recruited later on also. Perhaps I was meant to feel that way as the cult was only doing what it did in order to survive for another generation. Much of this moved into dark fantasy, rather than horror and the cult fascinated me rather than give me the shivers. For comparison, this was not the case with Last Days and The Reddening, both by Adam Nevill, which featured cults which scared the crap out of me. This cult was rather different and should not be taken as a criticism as it was brought to life incredibly well.

After about 400-pages Bone Harvest really begins to motor and the Deenie Keeling story is superbly linked with the cult, beyond being a nosey neighbour. This was an outstanding development and played a big part in what was a highly entertaining ending. I would highly recommend this novel, which is a brilliant package of horror, dark fantasy and an ancient belief system which is so clever it is worth reading just for that. And gardening. And strawberries which taste like human flesh. Yuck.

It’s rare I find a book that keeps me gripped by my throat, refusing to let go until I finish it. I’m usually pretty good at reading a few – and only a few – chapters before heading to sleep, but Bone Harvest had me staying up late just so I could find out how things would turn out. Even when I wasn’t reading it, I found myself drawn to the characters, thinking about the strangeness of the Farrow, their god, and the politics involved on a local community allotment.

I love horror, from all countries, but I have been reading a lot of USA based horror recently, and to dig my teeth into something so very British was an absolute joy.

Bone Harvest starts in the trenches of World War I, where a man called only the deserter, searches for something away from the donkeys leading lions to slaughter. The deserter finds it, in a way, with a mysterious company who follow orders from no man, and who eat whatever they can find in No Man’s Land.

It’s hard to go much more into plot without giving things away. The book jumps forward in points, and the technique was handled well, carrying the reader through the intervening years and allowing us to see the changes on the characters as the Twentieth Century turns into the Twenty-First. The main bulk of the novel takes place in a present day small community, where an elderly woman called Dennie struggles with dementia, and distrusts her new neighbours.

Various viewpoints come into play throughout the novel. The Farrow are worshippers of an ancient god, who either draw in or come up against the allotment residents. It makes for an interesting dynamic. The characters throughout are well written and believable, with Dennie refusing to admit anything is wrong, David doing anything he can to protect his family, and Angie, who just wants to maintain control of the allotments. But my particular favourite character is Everett, a man who charms those around him, who does whatever he can to remain in control, and who calls everyone ‘chum’. He’s one of those characters who’s endearing, even though you don’t particularly want him to be.

The small touches make this novel really stand out for me. The sense of Britishness comes through nicely and naturally, and the various settings – from the trenches to the village where we originally meet the Farrow, and right through to the allotment and farm later on – are drawn wonderfully, allowing the reader to vividly picture them and the characters who inhabit them.

It’s hard in this book to know who to root for. Not to say the good guys aren’t clear, but the bad guys are engrossing, and it makes you want to see them succeed, in some ways anyway. Brogden also does something clever towards the end, flipping some of the ideas carried throughout the book, and allowing the reader to see certain situations in a new light.

It’s a fantastic book that, despite its length, I tore through. I cannot recommend this one highly enough, and I suggest it gets added to your TBR asap.

On the killing fields of World War One, a British soldier abandons his regiment to join the Grey Brigade – a company of deserters who pledge allegiance to no country and fight for no army. Amongst this motley group he meets Bill, an adherent of an old Celtic religion, who makes outlandish claims that cannot possibly be true.

A hundred years later, a young couple take on the allotment pitch next to Dennie’s. Soon, the disappearances begin, and Dennie is left to decide whether there’s really something wrong with the new tenants, or whether her suspicions are just the fantasies of her fragile mind.

Bone Harvest begins slowly, but soon builds into an unputdownable page turner. The shift in focus from the deserter to Dennie is a little jarring, but the Dennie section of the novel is larger and more intriguing, so it’s not too much of a problem. I often see reviews claim that a book has ‘undercurrents of dread’ or suchlike, but in this case I really did feel quite anxious about Dennie, and had to keep on reading to find out what happens with her. Not too good for my insomnia, but I thoroughly enjoyed it!

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Australian author James Brogden's new novel should be a rip-roaring read about a cannibal cult that thrives on human flesh and misery.
And it is... until it isn't.
Opening up in the battlefields of WWI, the story introduces us to a soldier along in the trenches of no man's land, who when staring down the door of death, finds solace in the strange ways of the Fallow - a mysterious and powerful group of cannibals that seem to thrive at times of great conflict.
And things are great - for the first 80 pages or so.
But then we are thrust into the main story, in which - now in modern day - a woman battling early-onset dementia must face off against a strange group of new neighbours - our cult - that moves into her village.
It's a POV shift that we never recover from, as the story seeks to build a fresh thriller around this woman's suspicions around these mysterious new neighbours and her inevitable throwdown with evil.
In the end, it's a story that never really delivers on its promise.