Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

Just when despondency was beginning to descend, due to the apparent lack of support for our launch of The Lost Lullaby, something happened to really brighten our day.

Of course, I blamed everything on my rusty brain, basically, the lack of enthusiasm on my part. I thought I had tried my best, but even I know that I am not the person I once was…

Then two of our follower friends sent me emails of their amazing reviews! They did this because they knew something had gone wrong, as they had tried to post their reviews on Amazon and failed.

Reviews

Desperate to rekindle her love of writing, Maggie rents an old house in Cornwall. She expects dust and cobwebs, but not a silence that listens. From the moment she crosses the threshold, the rooms seem to lean closer, the walls brimming with a presence that knows her name before she can speak it aloud.

What begins as unease deepens into an obsession.

A cradle waits in the attic, carved with letters that seem to twist when she looks too long. A lullaby drifts through the dark, tender and terrible, coaxing her to surrender the last fragments of herself.

As the house closes in, Maggie is forced to fight not for escape alone, but for her very identity. To survive, she must hold on to the one thing the house cannot claim…

I promised to write a review and here it is.

I am not very good at reading things from a screen, so it took me a while to read this, but I am so glad I did!

First, I love ghost stories, and this is one of the best I’ve read.
It starts simply enough with Maggie renting the house and shopping in the village for supplies though the locals don’t seem exactly friendly.
That doesn’t matter as the story does not revolve around her relationship with them, but the house itself.

Anyone who has lived in or visited an old house will appreciate the creaks and groans of old wood, unexplained but acceptable noises in the silence and shadows that were familiar and friendly.
Maggie had all that, but the shadows were not friendly, the creaks and groans mocking, haunting and terrifying, and the silence broken by someone calling her name.
What follows is a battle of wills for her sanity as the house lures her into a false sense of security in order to absorb her, but her consciousness fights back.
The house teases, torments, and consoles, a cradle rocks on its own, an embroidered cloth appears at will, and throughout it all, the hum of a lullaby taunts Maggie’s senses until she is mute and the house speaks through her as it tries to possess her.

It is not a long book, some 56 pages in my download, but it is packed with suspense and tension. So much so, that I read the last 16 pages in one go as I could not stop reading.

An excellent read Anita, and IMO this would make a good film.

Out today – The Lost Lullaby by Alex Rose

Maggie is a writer who rents an isolated cottage in Cornwall so she can ‘get back to herself’. Instead she ends up losing more and more of herself to the malevolent force that haunts the cottage.

We don’t find out much about Maggie, except that she lives in London and wishes to escape from its constant distractions in order to write her ‘great British novel’ in peace and quiet. The cottage has no electricity or running water, but it’s alive with a terrible intelligence that has no interest in her writing project and soon makes it clear its needs are more important than hers. From the moment she steps inside, it’s as if she’s entered another time – or even another dimension – where it’s impossible to write, impossible to escape, and impossible to tell the difference between dream and reality. The story is told from inside her head as she slowly unravels in the claustrophobic grip of the house’s relentless power.

No explanations are offered, rational or otherwise, for the haunting, and there are few details to anchor the reader to past, future or the outside world. Instead, the author places us firmly in the present moment, using language skilfully to craft a story that gives us the experience of a prolonged nightmare, with that peculiar sense of menace that only comes in dreams.

I received an ARC of this book in return for my honest and impartial review.

So, what was the cause of all this? Apparently, without my knowledge, Amazon has been playing silly buggers with our account. Turns out, the problem was the new pen name, so carefully chosen for Anita’s new genre. I hadn’t logged it into Author Central, something I thought happened automatically. 

Silly me, not much happens automatically these days!

This should be rectified shortly, I hope. So we would like to thank all of you who have read and reviewed The Lost Lullaby. You have our grateful thanks for making our day!

PS: All of this good stuff has woken up my muse, and I am writing up a storm!  Maybe there is life in this old dog after all…