well written with a good cast of characters and an engaging storyline. At first this book was a slow burner - and I mean sloooww to the point where I didn't kniow if it was for me, but when the tension started to increase the pacing was right alongside it. I ended up liking it but I would have enjoyed a faster pace more.

CA Fletcher’s second novel starts slow, filling you in on the location and the characters while an undercurrent of uneasiness is lightly sketched in in the background. That undercurrent swells and rises like a tide, until it bursts its banks and everything goes very bad very quickly. On its own terms this is a decent horror novel, and would have made a great 80s John Carpenter movie. My twinge of disappointment is that the author’s previous book is one of my favourite genre novels of recent years, and this one isn’t at that level. You’ll still have fun with it, but please read A Boy And His Dog At The End Of The World as well!

Dead Water by C.A. Fletcher

water-borne blight hits a small community on a remote Scottish island. The residents are a mix of island-born and newcomers seeking a slower life away from the modern world; all have their own secrets, some much darker than others. Some claim the illness may be a case of mass hysteria - or even a long-buried curse - but when ferry service fails and phone towers go down, inconvenience grows into nightmarish ordeal as the outwardly harmonious fabric of the community is irreversibly torn apart.
Not my usual read and somewhat a slow burn , but I ended up enjoying the title.
You could feel The creeping anxiety of the island and the fear of who could be next to succumb . It is also a tale of the breakdown of a small community .

I quit this book at 35% as there was little to justify calling it horror. It was just too slow, jumping around characters on a small West Coast Scottish island, where something 'bad' was obviously going to happen. The problem was it was taking too long getting there, the author should have spent less time on the many pages spent describing ravens and rabbits on developing the plot at a speedier pace. The reviews compared this book to Francine Toon's "Pine" which had a significantly more stronger sense of time and place and a supernatural story which grabbed. "Folk Horror" is very difficult to get right, but I found this attempt unconvincing and uninvolving.

Such a slow burner to start, that I began to doubt it was ever going to take off.
I should have had more faith, the writer was just setting the scene and getting us to know the characters before everything goes more than a bit wrong.
Pace really picks up, as does creepiness levels, making me glad for the slow introduction I getting to know these people and how they think.
This book wasn't quite what I expected, but I was pleasantly surprised by it.