Niteblade

Blood Orchard  

Book review by Sarah Hayes

The headlines read of six-month old triplets kidnapped, bloodied. The small town where they live is under a literal lockdown, and the sheriff is hell bent on finding the babies’ kidnappers, merrily abusing his powers as he goes. Having recently moved into town, Coren Raines finds himself in a hellish world of panic rooms and dead girls springing out of a well smelling of oranges. The deeper he falls down the bloody rabbit hole, the more Raines learns that this town is brimming with secrets better left buried.

In 1993, a terrible team of blondes bullied the town, beating on the young and the old alike. No one ever dared touch them, as they were the sheriff’s children. They called them the Blondies, and their favorite target was one Francine Heller. When the opportunity for a bit of revenge falls into Francine’s lap, she falls into some bad company in order to make the Blondies feel the same pain she has. But vengeance doesn’t sleep and the town will soon smell of blood and oranges once again.

Blood Orchard is a visceral mess of carnage and cusses and little else. I can handle gore and violence done right; this is gore and violence done wrong. All of the horror elements fall flat due to Hintz’s continual abuse of the “show, don’t tell” rule. None of the characters involved have any redeeming factors to them. There’s a difference between having a cast of gritty flawed characters and having a cast of utterly hateable characters, and Blood Orchard seems to gleefully drop itself into the later category. I’d be more forgiving of Blood Orchard if it had a decent story or even decent writing, but no, the story is lackluster and the writing lazy. But give Hintz credit: it’s a story you’d be hard-pressed to pull away from before the book’s end. It pulls you in and demands that you finish it, like it or not, and that is a compliment that is hard to earn.