Highland Cove by Dylan J. Morgan - Blog Tour

It’s another blog tour and this time it’s an amazing horror novel by Dylan J. Morgan. I’m always super excited to be a part of these blog tours. I find that the books that I’ve read are really good and it’s a pleasure to help promote them for the authors. Let’s celebrate this spine-tingling new novel with a chilling excerpt, book details, review and a chance to enter a giveaway!

Highland Cove
Publication Date: March 23, 2020
Genre: Horror/ Paranormal/ Ghost Story

Highland Cove Sanatorium sits abandoned on a desolate island one mile off the Scottish mainland. It’s a dark, foreboding place, filled with nightmares. Even darker are the asylum’s secrets: a history of disease and mental illness, macabre experiments and murder.

The tales of ghostly appearances are said to be more fact than fiction, but no one has ever documented the phenomenon. Codie Jackson aims to change all that. Arriving from London with his small independent film crew, they plan to make a documentary that will forever change their lives.

But when one of the crew disappears, things begin to spiral out of control. A storm closes in to ravage the island, and in the darkness Highland Cove’s true horrors are revealed. Now lost within the institution’s labyrinthine corridors, Codie and his team realize that their nightmare is only just beginning.

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Excerpt:

The air thickened as he climbed each step to the second floor. A gasp of wind—which had probably entered through a damaged window elsewhere in the structure—sighed down the stairwell in a breath laden with the stench of mould and decay. Something cracked in the building’s heart, the sound reverberating through narrow passageways. Liam froze, raising the recorder, hoping to capture an electronic voice phenomenon. The echo died rapidly, silence creeping once more through the hallways. A shadow fluttered over the wall ahead of him, crawling towards the ceiling while he watched its passage.

Probably nothing more than a cloud shielding the day’s final attempt to brighten a world falling to darkness.

Besides, having been blessed with a sixth sense, he didn’t need his equipment to detect them. His earliest memories were the night of his fifth birthday, in his small bed, the sheets pulled up to his chin as he sat cross-legged talking to a dead girl in the darkened corner of his room. She’d only revealed herself to him briefly, towards the end of their time together, before his family had moved south to the capital. It’d been easy to visualize her beauty; hair blonde and loaded with curls. He almost pictured the dimples on her cheeks when she’d told him they made her cuter when she smiled. Death had stolen all of it.

It was the real reason why spirits seldom revealed themselves. Life gave someone magnificence, an existence buoyed with hopes and dreams nurtured by the love of family and friends. The afterlife was a desolate place that stripped away the façade of happiness and presented a tortured, wretched soul.

Highland Cove Sanatorium housed many such entities.

Review:

This is one of the biggest mindf*ckery books I’ve read in a long time.

The story is appealing enough with the setting an abandoned aslylum on an island but the level at which this book twists and turns. I’m just still in shock. I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this book and while there were somethings that irked me. They didn’t take away from the overall suspense and horror that was felt with every page.

This is a ghost story of the highest order, filled with a lot of moments that caused me to have viseral reactions. There were parts that I gasped, parts that made my stomach turn in tense knots, parts that made me cry. If you want to be scared, nay terrified even, read this book.

I enjoyed the characters, their journey, what they go through during the course of the book. You connected with them and they were written well for sure. The setting was described perfectly and it is a setting that you can see in a movie. To be sure this would make for a pretty sweet movie. I normally don’t like what I’d call flowery descriptions but they fit really well with this book and I found that I really enjoyed them.

I will say that there is one character that I strictly didn’t like and for a bit I felt that he was too ‘untouchable’ but that feeling didn’t last long. The ending was a bit curious for me. It felt like an ending but the kind left open to interpretation. I can’t say I disliked it but I can’t say I fully felt satisfied by it. But what I can say is that I hope that Dylan J. Morgan keeps writing horror because he knows what he’s doing.

About Author:

Now living and working in Norway, Dylan J. Morgan was born in New Zealand and raised in the United Kingdom. He writes during those rare quiet moments amid a hectic family life: after dark, with limited sustenance, and when his creative essence is plagued the most by tormented visions.

He is the multi-genre author of ten books, all available exclussively to Amazon. Focusing on Horror, Post-Apocalyptic Dystopia, and sometimes a hint of Science-Fiction, his books cater for those readers who enjoy a dark, terrifying journey into worlds where a happy ending is seldom seen.

When not writing, and when not reading, he can be found roaming the realm of the Witcher 3, or witnessing satisfying deaths on Game of Thrones, or even listening to some of the loudest heavy metal in his iTunes’ library.

If you’re searching for that light at the end of the tunnel then stop looking—you won’t find it here.

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