Book Review: Ghost Camera

Title: Ghost Camera

Author: Darcy Coates

Genre: Horror, Paranormal, Short Stories, Fiction

Number of Pages: 341

My Rating: 💋💋

Book Summary:

They’re Always Watching…

When Jenine finds an abandoned Polaroid camera, she playfully snaps a photo without a second thought. But there’s something wrong with the image: a ghostly figure stands in the background, watching her.

Fixated on her.

Moving one step closer with every picture she takes.

Desperate, Jenine shares her secret with her best friend, Bree. Together, they realize the camera captures unsettling impressions of the dead. But now the ghosts seem to be following the two friends. And with each new photo taken, a terrible danger grows ever clearer…

THE HORROR HAS ONLY JUST BEGUN.

Full of rich bonus material, Ghost Camera contains even more chilling tales from USA Today bestselling author Darcy Coates, including:

• A woman survives a plane crash in a remote arctic tundra, accompanied only by a stranger who seems fixated on something moving through the blinding snow.
• A house stands empty. Hungry. Waiting for the children drawn to it like moths to a flame.
• A woman finds a shoebox filled with old VHS tapes. They have a note attached: “Don’t watch. You’ll regret it.”

My Thoughts:

I finished this novel near the end of October, so I’ve been putting off this review a bit.

I should have read the description more closely when I looked at this one on Bookoutlet.ca, because when I read it quickly, I expected the vast majority of this novel to be about two friends who now have to deal with a haunted camera or ghost camera. It sounded intriguing and I figured the bonus stories would be closer to the end of the book. Boy was I incorrect.

I will credit the author for being majorly creative and I did find some of the other stories to be far more intriguing and much better written than the novels title story. In my opinion, I found Payment for the Dead, Death Birds, Untamed Things, A Box of Tapes creepy, eerie and all around captivating. I wish these stories were longer to be quite honest or even their own novels. I would have loved to have dived in deeper and gotten more nitty gritty and detailed.

However, the title story Ghost Camera was….lackluster at best. It felt a bit rushed, especially at the end and the character development was okay. I will say the friendship between the two girls was very well written and something I feel felt like was a genuine friendship you would come across in the real world. However, the story felt a little boring to be honest. I feel like it could have been extremely unsettling if it had been longer than exactly 100 pages.

Now let’s discuss the short stories I did enjoy briefly, shall we?

Payment for the Dead was about a man who falls on hard times and takes a job as a grave digger with a man named Pieter. Working in the cover of night, digging up bodies for cash just to get by and to provide for his family, especially during Christmas. This job paid double and occurred without warning. He was later informed that he stood in a child’s grave and the parents paid the witch outside of town to have their son back….

Creepy right! I won’t spoil it entirely, but it was so good!

Death Birds was about a doctor who is working his shift at the hospital when he notices a these supernatural birds or ‘Death Birds’ as they are known. According to the story, they show up with death is about to occur and they feast on the dead bodies. There was an unusually large number, hundreds if I recall in this one location….the hospital. They called in extra staff (nurses, doctors, etc) because they were expecting a large flood of patients due to some catastrophic event, however what they didn’t expect was it to happen right there at the hospital…

DUN DUN DUUUUUUN…INCREDIBLY WRITTEN!

Untamed Things was part of the excerpt on the back of the novel and frankly they did a pretty good job at a short description. This is about a woman who survives a plane crash and discovers there is only one other survivor. The woman claims to have experience in the frigid mountains that they landed in and fixated on moving forward so they don’t get caught by the creature following them. Eventually a rescue team finds her in the nick of time, but her companion is no where to be seen…

OOO, honestly so creepy and had me at the edge of my couch reading it!

A Box of Tapes was another excerpt on the back of the novel and once again, well done for a quick short description. A woman moves into a new home, in a new town with her daughter. She finds a box of old VHS tapes and attached is a warning note not to watch them. Curiosity killed the cat and she begins to watch the videos, disturbing imagery and unnerving events are depicted. What’s worse is that things begin to happen in her home and around her daughter which makes her begin to question and investigate what really happened within the tapes….who is that creepy woman? What is happening to her? Is she really seeing the woman in the woods?

To say this was so unsettling is an understatement, it is literally everyone’s worst nightmare! Incredibly well written and should have been a novel all on it’s own.

Sadly though, those were the saving graces of this novel. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t recommend reading this book personally and I had such high hopes for this one. However, I am not saying the author isn’t talented, like I said the few short stories I did enjoy in this were intriguing and you can tell she is a wonderful writer. So I have a few other novels on my TBR list by her that I will eventually get to. But sadly, for me, Ghost Camera kind of missed the mark.

Hope you enjoyed and keep an eye out for the next review which will be the novel Dumplin’ by Julie Murphy. This one I recently finished.

I’ll also be doing, what I am going to call, Mini Book reviews. It’s the first in the series and these will be books, magazines, etc that I finish quickly. So look out for Scary Book of Christmas Lore: 50 Terrifying Yuletide Tales from Around the World by Tim Rayborn.

Ciao!