Dark Teardrops – Book Review

by | Mar 10, 2016 | Reviews | 0 comments

dark-teardropsDark Teardrops
Catherine Tramell
Bebookness
October 28, 2015
Reviewed by Stuart Conover

Dark Teardrops is the debut novel by Catherine Tramell. In it she wants a pure focus on demonic procession as she has written this directly for fans who, like herself, grew up in both fear and awe of The Exorcist. The feeling of the novel is very much a spiritual reboot of the follow up drawing on many of the same ideas, themes, and imagery of the original and setting it in more modern times. With rumors of an actual reboot of The Exorcist being pitched for television (on Fox of all places), this seemed like the perfect time to dig into a boot which hopes to capture the same scares that the original was able to induce in us all.

So what’s it about? The official synopsis of Dark Teardrops has it as the following:

They idyllic and peaceful family life of Jame O’Neal ended abruptly with the death of his wife a few months ago. Since then, he has become a shadowy, silent man with an uncertain future and the moral responsibility of raising his eight-year-old daughter with the help only of his maid and his mother who lives in a senior’s residence.

Over only 7 days, this situation becomes the least of his problems when a terrifying secret from the past, that defies all human comprehension, shakes the foundations of his fragile family once again, pushing him to the extremes of his sanity and drowning him in a nightmare that seems to have no end.

So how did it stack up?

We start off with the events being told having already happened which for me is something that often takes away from high stakes. That being said, it was done smartly by having someone else talking about the story who wasn’t directly involved in it to not remove the suspense on if our main characters had survived or not. However, it also made it hard when we jump right into a story with details that you wouldn’t expect the narrator to have.

Ignoring that, as it is a work of fiction, it was quite easy to fall into the novel head first and wanting to know what happens next. Demonic possession is something that is a hard sell to pull both off and on screen, and to successfully do it on page can be even more difficult. Aside from some sentences that were far too long for their own good, which could briefly take you out of the story, Tramell was able to fully invest not only in the characters and what was happening to them, but truly wanting to see what happens next.

Dark Teardrops is worth the read if you don’t mind some overly descriptive areas and a few sentences that stretch on for too long. It isn’t every day we get to read about children being taken by demons and Tramell really does a good job at balancing the horror while trying to keep the story grounded in modern times.

About Stuart Conover

Stuart Conover is a father, husband, blogger, published author, geek, entrepreneur, editor of Buy Zombie, horror fanatic, science fiction junkie, lives in a world of comics, and a casual gamer (all of this when his wife lets him of course.) He fell in love with science fiction and horror at the same time while watching the movie Alien at probably far too young of an age while still being extremely impressionable and has been happily obsessed with both since!

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