As I was listening to the first chapter of Burn the Dark by S.A. Hunt I thought “The flow is not so great and this doesn’t seem that well written.” Then chapter two started and I was hooked. It wasn’t that chapter one was bad. Chapter one was the version as it was narrated and put up on YouTube. The story is about Robin, a YouTube celebrity with more than a million followers. Her channel chronicles her adventures hunting witches, supposedly its fictional, but Robin is for real. She saw her mother killed by witches and ended up in a mental institution for several years. She is holding it together, doing the best she can, while walking on the line between the normal world and the supernatural one. See, she trained up to be a witch hunter and now she is out for revenge.
She has killed several witches, but now she has gone back to her home town to face the oldest and most powerful coven in the country, the ones that killed her mother. There is a single father and his son living in her old house and the boy and his friends get caught up in the story. Robin also makes friends with some people who she knew as a kid and a military vet who lost his leg. The characters are unique and give the story lots of personality. The witches are evil and scary. The supernatural phenomena is very scary.
I listened to the audio version of the book and the reader, Saskia Maarleveld, was great. The tone and cadence matched the content. I give lots of points for creativity and Burn the Dark sparked the imagination. So far, it my favorite book of 2020. The only downside of the story was that it ends midstream and I have to wait to get the second installment in the Malus Domestica series. If the story sounds good and you can handle a bit of horror then I think you’ll really like it.