 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to 31 Days of Halloween. Today we are talking about Scott Carson's newest book, Where They Wait. If you don't know, Scott Carson is the pen name for Michael Corita, who is a thriller writer. He is writing horror under the name Scott Carson. I read and absolutely loved The Chill and Atria Publishing. They sent me The Chill also. Atria Publishing was kind enough to send me a review copy, an early reader's copy. And this one comes out on October 26th, just a few days before Halloween. The show is called Halloween. Anyways, so this book, I was very interested in it because I loved Scott Carson's, well I want to say first book, but it's kind of weird saying that for a pen name. But I loved The Chill and I was hyped for this one. This one unfortunately did not hit as hard for me as The Chill and I'm about to explain why. But for those of you who come in for the TLDW to Long Den Watch, I'm going to give it four stars. I read this one aloud to my wife and she enjoyed it. She also agreed with my points that I'm about to bring up. And it just, this is going to be something, it might be spoilery. So if you're worried about spoilers, you can click away also. The reason I say spoilery is because I'm going to compare it to something that's not really ever mentioned in the book. And I'm just glad I will say this. I read and really hated Ezekiel Boone's The Mansion because it was like a reboot of The Shining with Tech, you know, with modern technology. And this one is a reboot of something else. I will get to it later in the review so there's not a spoiler right up front. But the book is about Nick Bishop who goes back home to Maine, typical set up, set up for, he's a journalist, writer, typical set up for a horror novel, which is something, another thing that, you know, I kind of, which led to me only giving it four stars is just something, you know, we've seen so much of it. But he goes back home because his friend Pat Ryan gives him a job writing a piece on something called the Clarity app. And the owner of the app gives Nick Bishop the beta version of an app that is not like, it is a mindfulness app and it's supposed to be able to change your dreams, you know, give you better mental stability, all that stuff. So it's becoming help with sleep, all that. Things start going downhill very, very quickly. Pretty much as soon as he leaves the Clarity offices, the Clarity offices, I thought was what I thought was cool was they repurposed an old mill, the Heffern Mill to make this thing. And here in our town, they are repurposing a gin mill into luxury apartments. So if you read it, it's like, oh, they wouldn't do something like that. It's literally happening in my town. I don't know what it is about the, why not just tear it down and, you know, build a new building. I think that's what they did in the book. But here they are literally just converting an old mill into luxury apartments, whatever. So in the book, Nick bumps into a bunch of people that he knew earlier in his life. His mother had a stroke on a trail. And so she's in a care facility in the town that he is at now. And he bumps in, well, not bumps into, but Renee works for Clarity. She was a childhood friend. I felt that I didn't feel her setup was done as well as it could have been right off the bat. She's, I don't know, maybe it was now that I'm looking back on it. It's just, right off the bat, it was like, oh, the only thing that we were really told about is what, how she was when she was a kid versus, we didn't get much about what she does now, what she likes or likes, dislikes, anything like that. All we get is the backstory. And with Nick, that's pretty clear also. And this book does have a lot to do with memory. So I think it's important. It's just, I don't think Renee was fleshed out enough. It felt like she was just a love interest brought in to be just that, the supporting love interest. And that's another minor complaint that I have about this book. Now I think the biggest one is, and we're going to go into spoiler territory here, so if you're worried about spoilers at all, this is kind of going to give away the entire rest of the book. So you might want to click away. So spoilers in three, two, one spoilers. So this felt just like the fog, John Carpenter's the fog. I'm not sure if that was a remake of an earlier movie or not, but it felt just like it. It has to do with fog. It has to do with shipwreck. It has to do with all that stuff. And I think that's the biggest reason why I'm only giving it four stars. I was interested and I enjoyed the book, but it did feel like a modern reboot of the fog with modern technology, which is one of the things that I didn't like about, there's a lot wrong with the mansion. That book, I barely, I barely finished it. But with this one, Scott, Scott Carson, obviously Michael Karita, whatever you want to call him, he's obviously a talented writer. But this one felt way too long. And I say that because there's a lot of stuff that goes on like you're reading a list of instructions. He walked out the door, he walked down the store, down the steps store, he walked down the store, walked down the steps, got in this truck, turned on the engine, pulled out of the drive, drove down the street. There's a lot of that in here. Instead of just, you know, he left and drove to this place. There's a lot of that so much so that I got tired of reading it. And that's another thing that lessened my enjoyment. Well, the reason why I'm giving it a whole four stars instead of something like three is because I didn't feel that I never really wanted to stop reading, even though those points, it felt like filler constantly. Because the book is almost 400 pages long. And I felt it could have easily been trimmed down by 50 pages, just removing some of the, what is it, by rote. The things that, you know, just going through the meaningless stuff to get one character to another. It's nothing like Bentley Little where, you know, he has to open up every single chapter with what the person ate that day and all that. But it kind of is because there's a certain formula here. And you have your plot points that you need to hit, and then you have to fill in the rest of it. If there's not much going on, because this is a very slow burn. And then you get to the end and you get all the revelations and everything. Everything comes together, just like, yeah, just like, you know, your normal thriller. But the horror aspects, I thought were done very, very well. And I enjoyed reading those, especially mainstream horror. It's when some lose some nowadays, especially with all these damn reboots instead of people doing original ideas. And I think this one is one of those is as good as John Carpenter's The Fog? No. It's nowhere near as good. But it is good. I enjoyed it. And most people who read this will enjoy it. I fully expect to see many five stars from friends, because they're not going to be nitpicky like me. And they're going to be more forgiving of the reboot stylization, the reboot style of the piece. I just, I'm also, I'm also to the point where I think I really enjoy, well, sorry, I really don't enjoy books about modern technology. I don't know why that is. My friend Max Start gave me gruff about this because he said, well, you love the Chucky reboot. I love the Chucky reboot because it actually had characters that, you know, I could care about. And that's one here. I did care about Nick. I cared about his mother. I really, really wanted to see the villain in the story get his comeuppance. And he does. So all boxes checked as far as character pacing and dread, you know, the mounting dread throughout the book is good. And I just feel that it is going to be liked by by most. And for the most part, me and my wife enjoyed reading it. So four stars. I don't really, I don't really want to give it three, I guess 3.5. That's what I'm going to settle on. I'm going to settle on 3.5 stars here. So I will amend my Goodreads rating. Well, actually, you can't because they don't do 0.5, you know, but there's that gray area between three and four Goodreads. You got to let that's why I like book likes back to anybody. Remember book likes? Oh God, what happened in that place? Anyways, but yeah, so have you read an early version or are you coming to this review because you're thinking about reading the book? Or did you is the book out now and you were coming to watch this video now that it's out? Whatever, let me know your thoughts about the book down there in the doobly-doo, whether or not you loved it, whether or not you hated it, whether or not you felt mad about it. But if you felt any of those things, let me know why in detail so that we can have a discussion. But until next time, I am an E, you have been you. This has been another episode of 30 Days of Halloween. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye. Here at the end, I really hope, I really hope I don't shoot myself in the foot here. I know this wasn't a final copy, but it was riddled with errors and I do hope that's why I'm putting this here at the end. I do hope that the book is cleaned up better before it goes to publication. Okay, bye-bye.