The Lighthouse

Seriously one of the scariest things I've ever read. The tension in this YA horror is gut wrenching; in a mostly delicious way! Jess is telling the story of her family's time staying on Bird Rock in a haunted lighthouse. When she visits her father and stepmother working on the island all hell breaks loose as she and her sister Rosie determine that the lighthouse is, in fact, haunted. Strange historical occurrences start creating bedlam as Will tries to uncover what happened to his sister one year before and Jess tries to make sense of what is happening now. The tension wracks up as birds attack, random eels arrive and more disappearances confuse Will and Jess. I read most of this in one sitting and at the end I was quite overcome. I suspect there's another one; at least I hope so! A rollicking good read for the slightly older reader who likes a good nail-biting horror.

Set on a remote island called Bird Rock, we follow Jess and her sister Rosie as they spend time with their dad and step family.
Whilst dad and step mum research the birds on the island Jess and Rosie have to keep themselves amused….but with nothing and no one around they can’t do much…until they start to explore the lighthouse. Things go from bad to worse and when Rosie goes missing no one remembers but Jess!
The author is very good at keeping the reader on edge and wanting to read more! And the ending is the icing on the cake!!!
I really enjoyed reading The Lighthouse and I’d recommend it for readers 11+.

Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

“Don’t go near the lighthouse.”

There’s not much to do on Bird Rock. The island has no shops, locals or phone reception. What it does have are thousands of gannets, some stone bothies, a lighthouse and an abundance of guano.

Fifteen year old Jess Oliver is definitely not keen on spending two weeks of her summer vacation there. Rosie, her twelve year old sister, is more positive about the trip and hopes to take an award winning photo while she’s there.

Their father and his new wife, Kate, both ornithologists, are working on the island. The sisters will be meeting Charlie, their stepbrother, for the first time.

“The lighthouse is haunted. Cursed. It’s a dangerous place. Something will happen if you stay here. Something bad-“

Because this is an Alex Bell book, and a Red Eye one at that, it’s not long before strange things begin to happen. This was a compulsive read, with a centuries old mystery at its heart, some great creepy moments and a dose of sadness.

I enjoyed the gradual reveal of the history of the lighthouse and absolutely loved that I wasn’t able to figure out what was behind the mystery ahead of time.

Knowing what I now know, I want to return to Bird Rock and experience it all over again.

“I know you’re there.”

Content warnings include mention of death by suicide and mental health. Readers with emetophobia may have trouble with some scenes.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Stripes Publishing, an imprint of Little Tiger Group, for the opportunity to read this book. I’m rounding up from 4.5 stars.

Absolutely fantastic and atmospheric tale of a creepy lighthouse and how it affects the families who live there.
There's a mystery to solve, ghostly apparitions and moody locals with vague warnings to stay away!
The ending is just what I wanted :-) total creep fest.

I’m a massive fan of Alex Bell, and this book was amazing. It’s fast paced, it keep you guessing the whole way through, I always want more horror however the twists and turns were great. The writing easy to follow and great for when your inbetween longer books of feel yourself going into a reading slump. The ending of this book was incredible!!!! Never saw it coming. Amazing read!

I’m delighted to announce that the queen of Red Eye YA horror, Alex Bell is back, and she is on tremendous form with her fourth title in the UK’s most popular horror brand! The Lighthouse is Red Eye’s twelfth book since Bell opened the series with Frozen Charlotte (2014) and later followed it with The Haunting (2016) and Charlotte Says (2017) with this new offering being their strongest release since Savage Island (2018) and Whiteout (2018). School librarians up and down the country release a collective cheer whenever a new Red Eye novel appears as kids just cannot get enough of them and they beautifully bridge the gap between Middle Grade and YA. If you do not read much kids horror and are unsure what to recommend then the Red Eye brand is the perfect place to start and I absolutely guarantee that the incredibly well plotted The Lighthouse will have most young teens on the hook (and most adults) and make sure you hang around for a simply brilliant closing two pages which will wrong foot even the most jaded of adult horror readers.

The Lighthouse opens with fifteen-year-old Jess and twelve-year-old Rosie being shipped off to Bird Rock, a tiny island in the Outer Hebrides where they will stay with their ornithologist father, their half-brother Charlie and their stepmother. Jess narrates the story and is shocked to be stuck in such a remote location during the summer holidays, on an island dominated by gannets who shriek, stink, and poo endlessly. The family stay in the ancient lighthouse and bird hunters on the island say the lighthouse is haunted and has a very dark history. The manner in which the supernatural story was developed was perfectly pitched, expertly paced as Jess begins to feel increasingly isolated and things go bump in the night and Charlie begins to act stranger and stranger. But then things really kick off when Rosie disappears and nobody seems to remember her except for Jess. Along the way a teenage boy, with a tragic connection to the lighthouse helps out, and it was nice to see a token romance NOT thrown into the mix! This was a very cool pacey supernatural thriller. I loved it. AGE RANGE 11/12+

I cannot believe I’m saying this but….I’ve never read a book by this author before. I know, I know, I’m totally ashamed of myself.
This book is awesome! I absolutely loved the way it was written, such a great storyline and was easy to follow. The characters were so well thought out and well rounded.
There was enough going on in the book to keep my interest and I really did enjoy it.
The bonus now is, I have so many other books by Alex Bell to go back and read!
Highly recommend this to everyone.
5 out of 5 stars

The Lighthouse is eerie, suspenseful and utterly horrifying. I loved it.

I loved it opening with a different group of people to the main characters. I think that always works so well in horror, having something nasty happen to one group and then cut to another group just starting out on a journey. I also loved how nothing was really made clear in that prologue. Something bad happened in the lighthouse. Something we'll only find out about later.

One thing The Lighthouse does incredibly well is to build up suspense. From that prologue we know that it's a very dangerous building to go into. Then we see a family with several children going to stay there. This instantly raises alarms for the reader, and it doesn't take long at all until strange things begin to happen to Jess and Rosie. Nothing too terrible, not yet, but enough to put them and the reader on edge. Then there's that steady build up as things get worse and worse, building up to an incredibly dramatic and haunting climax.

The reveals are done cleverly too. Nothing is rushed, though this was a fairly quick read. Mysteries are slowly revealed through old journals, through letters, through folk tale accounts from locals, and through some incredibly grim discoveries.

Throughout all of this, there are other, subtle mysteries. Little things felt off and it was very hard to put my finger on just what it was but it left me feeling uneasy and unsettled. The truth of it left me feeling harrowed.

I also loved the references to Celtic mythology. This may be a classic haunted house ghost story, but it is also firmly rooted in Scotland, lending it an extra dimension of spooky creepiness.

The Lighthouse left me feeling disturbed and haunted, one of the best horror stories I've read in ages!

The Lighthouse is a seriously spooky and immensely atmospheric tale that keeps drawing you in right from the beginning. The story begins with three teenagers playing truth or dare near the infamous Bird Rock lighthouse; a lighthouse that houses secrets of a tragic past and one that the teenagers have been warned never to enter. The sense of foreboding oozes from the pages. What follows is a 'true account' of Bird Rock told from the viewpoint of Jess, who has had to visit Bird Rock with her sister so they can spend time with their father and his new family. This page turner is chillingly haunted and is perfectly written. Reminiscent in its style of Michelle Paver's Dark Matter, the plot teases and tantalises.
Thank you to Little Tiger and NetGalley for this e-ARC to review.
A hauntingly  5 star read.

Instead of two weeks Summer holidays in London, this year Jess and her sister Rosie are going to join their ornithologist father and his new family (his wife Kate and his son Charlie) on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides. Rosie is delighted. She loves everything spooky and is looking for a photo opportunity for a competition - and it just so happens that they're staying in an old lighthouse with plenty of ghost stories attached to it.
Jess is not quite as happy. She would have preferred staying with their father alone rather than with the family reminding her the only part she and Rosie play in their father's life is reduced to a couple of weeks a year. Unlike Rosie she doesn't believe in ghosts and the lighthouse doesn't hold any attraction for her - it's damp, smelly, like the rest of the island called Bird Rock, and has no WiFi.
Jess and her family are not the only ones on the island. As every Summer, a group of bird hunters - or guga hunters - has come to kill the younger gannets. Weary at first, Jess is going to find and ally and a friend amongst them.
The Lighthouse is one of Stripes' chilling Red Eye collection, so of course Jess's opinion that The Lighthouse is just an old building is going to be proved wrong. The Lighthouse is indeed haunted, and dangerous. As much as Jess tries to deny what's happening and find rational explanations, things get more and more unsettling until she's very close to losing what's most precious to her. The haunting is powerful and plays with people's minds and emotions, making the right very difficult indeed. Can Jess keep her friends and family safe?

I raced through the Lighthouse, going from spooky to gruesome surprises, guided by Jess's retelling in her own voice. There are plenty of startling twists and scares in the story, up to the very end... The Lighthouse is a delightful and masterful piece of horror writing. If you're looking for a read to chill you to the bone, look no further!

Thank you to Little Tiger Group and to NetGalley for the eARC of this book.

I have a strange adoration for lighthouses. There's something about their remoteness and resilence that I find deeply beautiful in a lonely, wistful sort of way. Whenever near the seaside, I visit them; when they crop up in books, I smile. It was therefore only natural for me to leap at the chance to read a book that centers around a lighthouse, especially a haunted, creepy one at that! What a lucky find for little ol' me.

The Lighthouse is a YA horror/mystery about teenaged sisters, Jess and Rosie, who are summoned by their father to the tiny remote island Bird Rock off the coast of Scotland. Their father is there with his new wife, Kate, and their six-year-old son, Charlie, studying the local gannets who call the island their home. On this island are a cluster of bothies (small stone houses) that turn out to be in use by local guga hunters, and the lighthouse.

The story is told in first person from Jess's point of view, and it goes at a break-neck speed. I was quickly gripped by, obviously, the lighthouse, and also the utter detachment from the rest of the world that faces this family as soon as they step foot onto Bird Rock. You get a real sense of "oh no this doesn't feel good" straight away, helped along massively by that hair-raising prologue!

The story is wonderfully chock full of twists and turns and snippets of past horrors dating back through the decades, complete with misdirections, an unreliable narrator, and shadows creeping in through the fog. The hands and shadows throughout the story genuinely unsettled me, and the scene in the fog was so visceral. When I got to the big reveal near the end, it was midnight and I was reading in the dark - I had to turn on my light and shut my bedroom door, because the descriptions and the pressing dark of the setting were just too much for me; I felt I was being watched, and that isn't something that happens regularly when I read horror. The excellent final twist on the very last page was one I hadn't guessed at at all, yet all the clues were there in hindsight (ah, what a beautiful thing!).

This is a YA horror done right: it has all the unsettling vibes you could ever want, the perfect location, and just the right amount of emotion.

That being said, I did have some minor gripes with this book:

1) Jess and Rosie's dad was rather unbelievable in places. There was a scene where he reacted in such an angry manner so immediately that I had to check I hadn't skipped a page by mistake. Without giving too much away, this was before his temperment became a plot point. I also found it quite unbelievable that he and Kate slept through someone breaking into the lighthouse and cutting through an iron chain - as they're parents to a bouncy six-year-old, I don't believe for a second that they wouldn't wake even at the sound of footsteps.

2) The pace of the story is a little too fast in some places. However, I appreciate that this is a book with quite a complex set of events happening in a relatively small number of pages. I think that allowing for another 100 pages would have fixed this.

I enjoyed this book a lot (I read it in one day), and if there is ever a sequel then I will eagerly await it with grabby hands! As with all ARCs I receive, I have pre-ordered a copy of this book and am looking forward to having the hard copy in my hands.

I haven't read Alex Bell before, but I read Point Horror and Christopher Pike when they were cool, I read Charlie Higson's zombie series and Micheal Grant's Gone, I read Stephen King now. This'll be fine, right? Nothing can be as bad as those!

Oh, how I envy two days ago me's innocence.

To be fair, it starts out merely creepy, with a spooky setting and strange birds. That's like a lot of books. Then Alex starts to pile on the tension. And then...I don't want to spoil it, but it is up there in the blurb...Rosie vanishes, not just physically but from everyone's memories as well. Jess's panic and horror are painful to read, especially as she realises she's starting to forget her sister too.

When I was reading the scene in the cellar, I had to sit up and turn on some extra lights.

And it doesn't even end there! Alex drops a huge sequel hook right near the end, and I very much hope it gets picked up. Although some of the mysteries have been solved, there's still plenty left to find out about the lighthouse and its strange inhabitants.

Alex has a gift for capturing emotions both good and bad, and I felt everything her characters did. I'll be going to look for some more of her writing. But...maybe in the sunshine?

Bird Rock is a dumping ground for gannets – literally, as you can smell their guano for miles. A seabird haven and not much else, there are some primitive and ancient stone bothies, and the lighthouse, which throughout its tempestuous history never managed to keep a keeper for long, as they all got carted off in a coffin, or a straightjacket, or begged to be replaced ASAP. Trying to stay there are our narrator’s family – her father and sister, and step-mum and step-brother. But their open air hobbies and bird-surveying and so on are at threat from a specially-arranged historical set of bird hunters, and might of course be threatened more by any real, as opposed to superstitious, nastiness in the lighthouse. And as you might be able to guess, the nastiness there is very real…

This seemed a really successful young teen horror, to me. Not having read anything in this imprint before it was the quite the eye-opener. The slow building start is a little too slow at times, perhaps, and when it comes some of the darkness might seem to be over-egged, with too many nasty elements at play. But when it all comes together to reveal its full creepiness, it manages to thrust a lot of inventive gruesomeness at us, and proves that it was able to convey some really strong and surprising subjects in a very fine light. Proper adult horror books often put their characters and readers through what they put them through with much less justification and conviction. This on the other hand was surprisingly intelligent, and nothing like a pure genre, throwaway piece. A strong four stars.