Lonely House – five star reviews

Images from Symi Greece by Neil Gosling and James Collins
Neil’s photos today. This one taken in Horio

Please excuse a bit of trumpet blowing, but I’ve had the second review of ‘Lonely House’ put up on Amazon. Thank you so much to Sarah and Mr Stephen for taking the time to write and post their reviews. You can check them out on the ‘Lonely House’ on Amazon page from where you can also buy a copy or three, but here they are as well:

Wow!” (five stars)

“Really inventive and would make a very spooky Film. A very good thriller typical of James Collins. I loved it.”

A True Page Turner” (Five Stars)

“Mr Collins has certainly found his feet in the literary dark world of mystery, suspense and horror with his latest offering – Lonely House. James has a light side, just look at his other work, but having served up (oops) the excellent ‘The Judas Inheritance’ which has been made into a film set on the wonderful Greek island of Symi, he now invites the reader to the Birthday Party from Hell.

This book is a feast (oops again) from beginning to end. Drover and Pete are Steinbeckish in their relationship and slowly their characters are unpeeled (!). The family they encounter proves to be equally interesting and James tantalises you by just releasing enough information on each to keep you wanting to know more about each of them. He has mastered that technique of forcing you to start the next chapter as you really care what happens to these people – some you want to stay with you, others you may want to kill.

This excellent story has a very satisfactory outcome – depending on your moral compass. You will not be disappointed if you are a fan of the macabre.”

Images from Symi Greece by Neil Gosling and James Collins
Diagoras coming back from a festival at St Emilianos

If you’ve thought, ‘It’s not about Symi and I don’t like horror’ well, fair enough. It’s got nothing to do with Symi, but there is a little horror in there. It’s not that I am fanatical about the gory stuff, I’d much rather a good gothic Universal black and white film style creepy story than anything to do with blood and guts, but it is interesting, to me, to take ‘ordinary’ characters and put them in extraordinary situations and see what happens. Not that any character you create for a novel should be just ‘ordinary’ and I hope the six in this story aren’t. But the two main characters certainly were not expecting to deal with what they end up having to deal with and that’s the horror part for me. It’s not about blood and guts, it’s about the horrific choices our two characters have to make.

Images from Symi Greece by Neil Gosling and James Collins
Everyone should have a cranberry (pink, cherry, scarlet?) coloured speed boat

And so, on to the next one and I’ve spent the weekend working through ‘Straight Swap’ and, again, no ordinary characters here. This lot are a bunch of oddballs living in a made up seaside town and there’s no horror – just a lot of confusion and I hope, a few laughs along the way. So, that’s coming on and soon I’ll be able to get a proof printed so I can get my ‘beta’ readers to check through it for me.

Images from Symi Greece by Neil Gosling and James Collins
Or a bight red moped

Meanwhile, the winter break is now all booked and finalised, more or less and I did go for The Nutcracker in the end. Well, I took a look at the Bucharest opera house and thought, ‘Gotta see that, it is SO camp.’ And the music’s good and it’s been ages since I’ve seen men in tights throwing girls in tutus in the air. So we’ve booked two stalls seats at the second highest price (only one or two rows behind the most expensive seats) and they cost us around €45.00 each, so you’re not gunna say no are you? I’ll let you know how it goes. I may even write a review. Which reminds me. Click this link, read the LH reviews again and start ordering copies for Christmas presents.

Images from Symi Greece by Neil Gosling and James Collins
Yours truly with Sam’s mum and step-dad