Hinton Hollow Death Trip
By Will Carver
Rated: 5 Stars *****

After Will Carver’s impressive book – Nothing Important Happened Today, which still won’t leave me. Hinton Hollow Death Trip seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. It is incredibly mesmerising and one of the most unique books of the year!

I thank Random Things Tours and Orenda Books for inviting me to review and for providing an e-book.

Find out the blurb and my review below of this amazing book that is hard to put down and when finished, doesn’t leave.

About the Author

Will Carver is the international bestselling author of the January David series.
He spent his early years in Germany, but returned to the UK at age eleven, when his sporting career took off. He turned down a professional rugby contract to study theatre and television at King Alfred’s, Winchester, where he set up a successful theatre company. He currently runs his own fitness and nutrition company, and lives in Reading with his two children. Good Samaritans was book of the year in Guardian, Telegraph and Daily Express, and hit number one on the ebook charts.

Blurb

It’s a small story. A small town with small lives that you would never have heard
about if none of this had happened.
Hinton Hollow. Population 5,120.
Little Henry Wallace was eight years old and one hundred miles from home
before anyone talked to him. His mother placed him on a train with a label
around his neck, asking for him to be kept safe for a week, kept away from
Hinton Hollow.
Because something was coming.
Narrated by Evil itself, Hinton Hollow Death Trip recounts five days in the
history of this small rural town, when darkness paid a visit and infected its
residents. A visit that made them act in unnatural ways. Prodding at their
insecurities. Nudging at their secrets and desires. Coaxing out the malevolence
suppressed within them. Showing their true selves.
Making them cheat.
Making them steal.
Making them kill.
Detective Sergeant Pace had returned to his childhood home. To escape the
things he had done in the city. To go back to something simple. But he was not
alone. Evil had a plan.

Review

Hinton Hollow Death-Trip is mesmerising and is another incredible unique, Must Read book from Will Carver. It’s poignant in ways you can’t even imagine until you’ve read it and digested all that it is telling you. It makes you think of life from a whole different perspective and then go off to want things to be better. Hinton Hollow is 1 place, but the people within it are also recognisable to be within your village, town, city.

It neatly starts with a prologue of who you will meet – A boy on a train, A detective, A pig hater, A food lover, A window breaker and your narrator. Sounds so far intriguing and eclectic. The narrator is the most unique I’ve ever seen. If I were playing a game of “guess the narrator”, I’d win! The narrator is the deepest, darkest thing you could possibly think of. The narrator is chilling in your mind and across your bones….. The narrator is…….. Evil!

Evil, although the embodiment of evil who is telling you this story of this small town, isn’t all you think it to be. This isn’t a book to enter into with preconceived ideas.

Will Carver is clever about playing on people’s psyches. He understands human behaviour. So, when he begins with the phrase,’Don’t Read This!’ of course you’ll read it. How can you not accept such a tempting invitation? You can’t help yourself. I mean, that makes you want to read on… Will Carver is quite the master of reverse psychology. It gets under your skin and into your mind in its uniqueness to how to begin a book.
The reader is placed right at every part of the book. The narrator will address you from time to time, like an actor might when looking straight down a camera lens.

Hinton Hollow is a pretty average town. I do love that people would rather walk than take their cars and really support their local businesses from the bakery to the independent bookshop, even though there are supermarkets. 

The boy on the train is 8 years old and travels 100 miles before anyone even talks to him (says a lot about the sorry state of society already). He has something around his neck. There’s a fantastically thought-provoking piece about bystander behaviour. I love it because it will be sadly so true for so many, so therefore this speaks a truth, right there, a window into society, that is more than just Hinton Hollow. This is a book that will really touch people.

The story goes on to list how evil may present itself and cleverly lists 1 that harks back to Nothing Important Happened Today. The narrator also demonstrates what it is not in the most unexpected of ways. I will say, that although there are mentions of some actions of the previous book, you can read this as a stand-alone too.

Readers will follow Evil for 5 days, although the story is over 7, encountering people it meets. By this time, you really won’t want to put the book down. It’s astonishingly brilliant and powerful as it grips. You will want to find out more. It’s another book that is relatable to what goes on today, told from a darker point of view. It shows life from a different perspective… That’s why it is so important!

Day One you meet childhood sweethearts, A town elder (or 2), Our detective’s girlfriend, The Brady family and an ordinary man. Evil talks about good and how it is viewed in society and how the bar is now set at such a low level to be called “good”. This however does cause some problems and challenges for “Evil”.

There are some life changing events on Day 1. Detective Pace has also only just returned to Hinton Hollow and attempts to rediscover where he fits back into the town, from the case about the strange suicide pact that was like no other.

Our narrator – Evil, loiters everywhere and around people you wouldn’t even expect!

Day Two and Three come and more can be learnt about how Evil moves and how things in this town changes. There’s an interesting bit that Evil tells us about how death is perceived between human and animal. I love that it spells out how perplexing it is. It probably isn’t something people think about. This is another thing Will Carver is incredibly perceptive about – he digs out these nuances of people and points them out to people within the story as Evil sees them, even though utterly perplexingly, Evil wonders if retirement is a possibility. This book has some unexpected dark humour such as this.

Hinton Hollow becomes a changed place from the beginning of the book as Evil works in further and yet almost tries to absolve itself from how people are behaving at times in the same way people try to say they are purely innocent of things when they are not or blame some evil force at work. 

Throughout the book there are also investigations going on, involving Detective Pace’s team.

Evil, in a wonderful passage even talks about death and about how some people don’t react to being told about it when it is perhaps not their loved one who died. I say it is wonderful because it’s incredibly thought-provoking.

On Day 4 readers are told that you will consider:
An old lady who won’t give up, A priest asking for forgiveness, The Raymond family, A pig stealer, Sibling rivalry, The importance of biscuits and the need for a little time. Upon reading the importance of biscuits, this was quite amusing.

Days Five and Six sees the coming to a close to the story. Even the ending is amazing. It will explain what you’ve just read and clarify it for you.
  Know this – it contains some of the most powerful and positive messages I think people will ever read. This is where there are straight messages, instructions even, that are incredibly powerful and not what you’d expect. This book actually presents a hope that things outside the book, in the real world can change for the better and so can people individually and collectively. It totally makes me smile. This is the book people need to read!

This book is another incredibly important books of our times. Will Carver’s  books may be dark, but sometimes that’s needed to create something more positive in society. He delves into the deepest darkest parts, which affects every single person’s life who is alive right now, and isn’t afraid to do so. He is also not afraid to say how to help fix societies ills and to make you think and perhaps it could affect you in postive ways.