When their mother is hospitalized, Tara and Kyle are sent to stay with their only remaining relatives, their grandparents.
It’s their first time meeting May and Peter Folcroft. The elderly couple seem friendly at first, and the house, hidden in the base of the mountains, is full of nooks to explore.
But strange things keep happening. The swing moves on its own. Peter paces around the house late at night and seems obsessed with the lake where his sister drowned. Doors slam and curtains shift when no one is inside. And one room is kept permanently locked.
When a storm cuts the phone line-their only contact with the outside world-Tara and Kyle must find a way to protect themselves from their increasingly erratic grandparents… and from the ghosts that inhabit the Folcrofts’ house.
The Folcroft Ghosts by Darcy Coates. 284 pages. Includes the short stories Clockwork, The Crypt and Subbasement. Published by Poisoned Pen, 2020. Originally published in 2017.
The Folcroft Ghosts story is a young adult gothic novel that definitely delivered plenty of creepy shivers. This author is so good at that and the young adult story was no different. In fact, it was actually a pretty dark story. D: I don’t want to say all the whys due to spoilers, but WOW it gets DARK! There are some really great twists that just slap you unsuspectingly in the face. I seriously did NOT see them coming at all. Like all of Darcy’s work, the setting and the ghosts are pretty spooky in all the best ways. It is just scary good fun.
The characters are all sympathetic and I even felt a little bad for the bad guys. Pretty sad story, but with a happy ending. Also… I loved how realistically out of shape the kids where when trying to run away. Not everyone can just run and run and run and not show any sort of cramp or shortness of breath or SOMETHING.
There were also three short stories included with this book. All three stories were pretty interesting because they were not your typical story from Coates. It was really cool getting a small taste of other types of horror from her.
The first one is Clockwork. It was extremely short but crammed full of obsessiveness and tension. Totally crazy story about a clock repairman who goes to a clients house that has a room filled with clocks. I had zero idea where we were going with this story, but you could tell it wasn’t going to end well for the main character! It was alright but a little bit unclear as to what exactly was going on at the end… like, is there magic involved? Is it a serial killer? Is it a magic serial killer? *shrug* Don’t know… but still fun!
The second story was The Crypt, which I have and read on my kindle. I’ve blogged about it recently. It was a unique vampire story that was pretty fun.
The third story was by far my favorite of the short stories- Subbasement. In an office building, nobody likes to go down to the subbasement to pull old files. There are all kinds of wild stories about what is down there. OMG this one was SO good! 😮 It just has a little bit of EVERYTHING in there! I really liked this short story. I would have loved to have seen this as a full novel. There was just so much stuff you could explore. Too much fun.
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