So Cold the River
Oct 12, 2010
Author: Michael Koryta
Category: FICTION, SUSPENSE & THRILLERS
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Format: HARDCOVER BOOK
Publish Date:6/9/2010
ISBN: 9780316053631
Good horror stories are hard to write. Some can become so convoluted and bizarre you can’t figure out what’s going on, some are just too gross to keep reading and some lose you from page 6 when you realize it’s the same story you’ve already read in 10 other books. Michael does a nice job of coming up with an original story, written in an easy tone that allows you to immerse yourself in the book – not backtracking every other page to figure out what just happened. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a horror story, I would call it an intense and spooky story.
Eric Shaw is a down on his luck cinematographer who now runs a event video business. Weddings, anniversaries, funerals, etc. He’s quite successful in his small business because he also happens to have a touch of psychic energy in him that pulls him toward certain settings and pictures, making his video shows very personal. He makes one so personal that he’s approached immediately after the showing by a wealthy woman who wants him to go back to his father-in-law’s hometown and make a video of his youth for a present before he passes away.
When Eric arrives at the town, with a mystery bottle of water from the famous sulfur springs there, very odd things start to happen. It gets even odder when he drinks from the mystery bottle… is he hallucinating or are things changing in town? He begins to not understand where visions end and reality begins. Even worse, he appears to have formed a physical addiction to the water in the bottle. On top of that, the man he’s supposed to be making a film about seems to be the wrong one everyone in town remembers.
Eric’s visions throw him into the town’s past, during the great depression, and he slowly learns what happened that leads to the way it is today. But will the side affects of the water kill him before he gets to the bottom of an old mystery and the reason why he was sent there in the first place?
