Kindle Edition Amazon Category:  Horror Type: Fiction Pages: 348 Copyright: Aug 3, 2013 Price: FREE! (eBook) 24 years ago they locked him away, now something evil is heading home with a whole new bag of tricks. "Matt Drabble is a name that will one day be as widely recognized as Stephen King & Dean Koontz" - READERS FAVORITE This Kindle version is completely FREE! Abra-Cadaver is a full length (327 pages) Horror/Thriller/Murder/Mystery. It is a winner of a prestigious Indie Book of the Day Award, a 2015 Kindle Book Review Award Finalist and is the 2016 Book Excellence Awards winner for Horror Fiction.  Matt Drabble also has a highest Amazon Horror Author Ranking of 5th.   Tommy, Dixon, McEwen, PJ, and Alison were always a close knit group, childhood friends who stood strong against the world around them with the sort of unbreakable bond that only exists in the minds of children. That was until Tommy's 12th birthday party. Obsessed with magic tragedy strikes when an illusion goes horribly wrong and a young woman lays dead leaving families screaming in horror. A local magician Albert Trotter is railroaded during a rigged trial and locked away to soothe the fears of a shocked community. His crime was to marry the daughter of a local powerful man and use her as his assistant in his act. Forever protesting his innocence he is forced to pay the price to allow good minded residents to sleep easy. After a vicious assault in prison, he is eventually sent to a mental institution in a catatonic state and a town breathed easy as his name becomes local legend. Now Tommy is 36 and heading home for the first time in over two decades. Returning to settle his father's estate and hoping to slip in and out of town unnoticed, but he's not alone. Someone is slaughtering the residents of Denver Mills and holding those involved with the Trotter trial in a steely grip of fear. Tommy will have to find the strength to bring his old friends together in order to solve the mystery and survive. Secrets and lies are exposed throughout the small town of his childhood as fractured relationships are put to the most extreme of tests. All of those that he once called friends now carry their own dark baggage, baggage that has followed them into adulthood scarring them all deeply. Something evil is coming home, and they're bringing a whole new bag of tricks. Excerpt He saw Katherine Jacket, one of the town’s three deputies standing on the farmhouse porch. Jacket waved him over with a shaky arm and a green face. She was the youngest deputy at 22 and Gaines knew that the other two would have given her the shitty detail to spare their own tender stomachs. Katy was a broad and athletic young woman who joined the thickset farmhands that permeated the small town. She was a milky white but strong looking young woman with wide shoulders and a seemingly permanent smattering of ache. Her most distinguishing feature was a small crescent moon birthmark on her cheek that she often hid with subtle makeup. Gaines had noticed that the young woman had a habit of placing her hand over her cheek in a casual gesture that spoke to her self-consciousness over the blemish. She might be first in line when it came to the physicality department, but her mind was also sharp and clear. “Hey Katy,” Gaines greeted her on the dirt track that passed for a driveway. “Hi Sherman,” Katy managed through green gills. “What have we got? Did old Dale finally fall over drunk and get himself mangled in one of the farm machines?” “Not exactly,” Katy said gingerly. “He’s over there in the doorway.” Gaines looked over the young deputy’s shoulder towards the house. He could see a pair of sturdy work boots sticking out from under a sheet. “What happened?” He asked, interested and afraid of the same answer. “From near as the doc can tell, he got sprayed in the face with something acidic.” “How acidic?” Gaines asked with a lump in his throat. “Damn near burned the flesh off right to the bone.”

ScaryMinds.com
Back when he was 12 Tommy Marsh lived in Denver Mills and had a group of friends he was inseparable from, Peter Joffre, Russell Dixon, Lee McEwan, and Alison Chambers. On his twelve birthday, June 1989, Tommy and friends were set to be entertained by The Captivating Cosmo X - Master of the Unknown, a local children's magician. Tommy and friends sneaked a look in the back of Cosmo's van and find a guillotine, which naturally they have to inspect more closely. Lee had a lucky escape from the engine of death as it appears to be malfunctioning. The kids didn't report the guillotine problem to the adults and are left feeling guilty when Cosmo's assistant, and wife, has her head severed by the contraption. Arnold Trotter aka Cosmo was arrested and found guilty during a trial that had been rigged by local businessman Adrian Todd, whose daughter Mary was the victim of the infernal machine. Trotter didn't escape direct retribution from Todd, and endured a hellish couple of days and nights being tortured in a secluded part of the prison he was sent to. His mind shattered Arnold Trotter was eventually sent to Blackwater Heights private hospital and consigned to the annals of history.

In the present, June 2013, Tommy Marsh is returning to Denver Mills to finalise the details of his recently deceased father's estate. Naturally he gets together with his friends to talk over old times and naturally a fire has broken out at Blackwater Heights with at least one prisoner unaccounted for. Arnold Trotter has escaped and is also returning to Denver Mills, but Arnold only has one thing on his mind, revenge against those who wronged him. Tommy March is about to experience a blast from the past and learn a lot of secrets Denver Mills has kept down the years, but will he survive a return performance from The Captivating Cosmo X - Master of the Unknown!

In a previous review of a Matt Drabble book, the collection After Darkness Falls Volume One I pointed out Drabble is a decent Writer with a very Brit sensibility, that extends to his long fiction as well judging from the prose delivered in Abra-Cadaver. What's more impressive is the novel is well paced, there's no dropping off in intensity as things heat up, it has engaging characters, and it shows an Author able to tackle the longer form without losing his beat. Matt Drabble is on in this novel and presents a narrative that does need the book length to be adequately explored.

At its dark heart Abra-Cadaver is a slasher tale that sticks to the requirements of that particular sub-genre, which is kind of cool as who doesn't like to dine out on a slasher once in a while. You know deranged killer, ingenious murders, last person standing, oh yes there will be blood. Surprisingly the Brits are quite happy to wallow in this particular Yank horror obsession, and arguably the Brits can call it their own with the great Agatha Christie laying the foundations of slasher dictum through the unfortunately titled Ten Little Niggers (1939). So Matt Drabble is pretty much keeping the literary fires burning in this his entry in the sub-genre. Let's break it down and shake it all around.

Firstly we have an interesting psychopath on the loose with a full arsenal of sharp objects at his disposal. Where Drabble gets the character right is in giving him a back story that just screams out revenge, adding almost supernatural elements to the character, and having him cut down the cast in interesting ways. If the entire world's a stage Drabble's character plans to paint that stage blood red and festoon it with all manner of viscera. Arnold Trotter is a great invention, the character is sort of sympathetic, has a whole mob of Roos loose in the top paddock, and goes about his business in inventive fashion. Drabble throws some clues into the novel along the way that alert readers will pick up on, there's a major twist in the tale coming towards the end of the novel that I'm not about to divulge. Suffice it to say that fans of Friday the 13th, Halloween et al are going to have the time of their lives with Abra-Cadaver. Please note I'm talking the original movies here not the half arsed sequels.

Naturally we have to have a list of possible victims, else there wouldn't be much point having a psychopath on the loose really. Matt Drabble creates an interesting array of primary characters, who naturally get picked off one and one, but also does that particularly English thing of introducing secondary characters only to have them die almost immediately. As any good Game of Thrones fan will tell you, don't get too invested in the characters, there is going to be a high casualty rate. Drabble writes excellent characters, with defining traits etc, he then torpedos their ship and strafes the lifeboats. So yeah, highly engaging characters going down at a rapid rate as the novel progresses, and yes some deaths are well past warranted.

Which of course brings us to a few people who make it through the novel, our "final characters" if you will. Matt Drabble hasn't been lured in by the "final girl" syndrome as a lot of Writers and movie makers seem to be, he goes with a final couple of people, which you are going to guess very quickly. There's no red herrings thrown in the mix, who you want to survive does, though that's not to say there aren't deaths you were hoping weren't going to happen. Anyway, Drabble has not one but two final confrontations, the second comes in a surprise twist I didn't see coming. Each confrontation is infinitely rewarding, and Drabble to his credit has left room for a sequel. Hands up who wants that novel written!

Throughout the novel, and its one thing I do keep note of, there are no scenes thrown in to pad out the page count, the length is necessary to tell the tale. Equally importantly, there are no unnecessary characters added just for local flavour or to have that one additional body littering up the village. I was also well past rocking to the mystery being unfolded page by page and the revelations our major characters go through as they learn the facts weren't what they thought them to be.

So I had a lot of fun with Abra-Cadaver, been a while since I've swam in the slasher waters and got to say the water was fine. Matt Drabble has written a solid thriller that would translate marvellously well to the screen. If after a read that will keep you hooked to the page, then this novel is that read, full recommendation.




The British Fantasy Society
During the seventies and eighties I remember when horror novels were about ghosts, vampires, werewolves. They also used the normal scare tactics to get their point across of how horror should get into our minds so we would believe what we read. These days, we are treated to horror advancement; gore, splatterpunk and menacing imagery that stuck in the mind long after it had been read. This story has the new age gore and splatterpunk that so many authors are using nowadays, some to good effect, others maybe not so good.

Abra-Cadaver’s story is simple enough; a group of children are at a 12th Birthday party held for Tommy. His friends known for being a happy bunch that were always seen together having fun, but after a trick goes horribly wrong, the five of them split up and don’t see each other again. Years after the incident, Tommy is older, yet wiser and returns to Denver Mills only to discover that a mysterious someone is killing the residents one by one using magic tricks to murder them. What Tommy doesn’t know was that several years before, Albert Trotter, a former magician had been locked away for a murder he says he didn’t commit. He still maintains his innocence, yet is beaten up in prison and later taken away to a mental asylum after a breakdown. Knowing this, Tommy has to gather his old friends around him in order to find out who the real killer is.

This in my personal view is very reminiscent of Stephen King’s IT with the children kept in a state of fear and dread due to the mysterious entity only to have the thing loom over them now that they are all adults. With the addition of magic tricks and magicians being put into what is already an established idea, Abra-Cadaver is an engaging book that is hard to put down once picked up; as the author does explain what happens to the characters has a long lasting effect on everyone. As I said earlier, if you like the sort of horror that has been out since 1986, this will serve to excite and thrill gore fans.



FaerieTaleBooks.org
Abra-Cadaver is a suspenseful, on the edge of your sit, thrill ride. Right from the start the reader is thrown into mayhem. A magic trick gone wrong, a dead woman, and a group of twelve year old boys that are traumatized from their experience. Then one day when they are older their past comes back to haunt them and the residents of their home town are being murdered in sadistic magic trick themed crimes. Now this group of estranged friends must get together and drag their past into the light of day to catch a mad man out for revenge.

This story will have you devouring every page wondering what is going to happen next. There are some funny moments, a lot of suspenseful ones, and a few of them scary. Right when you think you have everything figured out, nope, thing again! You will be guessing until the very end! A great read that will leave you sleeping with the light one!