Review: Isolation

Jim and Stephanie Miller are missionaries who have just returned with their children from a few years in Papau, New Guinea.  They saw unimaginable horrors while they were there and have returned worn out and full of doubt.  Stephanie is suffering from nightmares and sleepwalking and has woken up to find herself in some scary positions.  Jim is busy with a writing project and is too distracted to pay his family much attention.

When they’re offered a chance to get away for a few months in a mansion isolated in the mountains of North Carolina, Jim thinks it’s just what they need to clear their minds and bring their family closer together.  They head off to North Carolina, against the advice of Jim’s parents.

When they get to the mansion, they find they are sharing it with another missionary couple, but the house is so huge, it doesn’t really matter.  From the beginning, both Jim and Stephanie feel uneasy in the mansion and they both feel the presence of evil, but they never express it to each other.  They’re both determined to stick things out for the sake of the other.

Things seem to be going okay until Stephanie’s brother visits and they have a huge snowstorm that knocks out power and isolates them from the nearest community.  I don’t want to give away any more of the story, but that’s when things really begin to get creepy.

Isolation by Travis Thrasher is not the type of book I usually read, but I enjoyed it anyway.  I’m not a big fan of horror, because it keeps me awake at night, and while I found this book to be very creepy, it didn’t have that affect on me.  It’s published by Faith Words, but I didn’t find the book to be preachy at all – as a matter of fact, the characters doubted their faith throughout most of the book.  There is no sex or foul language in this book but there is violence.

I was hooked on this book right from the start.  The story line kept me interested throughout and there were a couple twists that I wasn’t expecting.  I even suspected the wrong person at one time.   One of the things that I enjoyed about this book is that you read some of the characters’ thoughts in first person even though it’s narrated in the third person.  I was so engrossed in the book, I would find myself urging characters to “get out of there” or “go back”.  They usually didn’t listen to me, though.

You can listen to an interview with Travis Thrasher on Blog Talk Radio. Click here to  enter to win a copy of this book plus an autographed copy of Travis’s newest book, Ghostwriter.