Nightmare

Back Cover

Ghost Town is the hottest amusement park in the country, but when Maia Peters visits, she's not expecting to be impressed. The daughter of two world-renowned "ghost hunters", she's grown up around the paranormal and to her most of the park is just Hollywood special effects. Until the very last attraction.

There, in a haunted house, a face appears from the mist. The face of Jordin Cole, a girl Maia knows. A girl, Maia discovers, who has gone missing.

Convinced what she saw wasn't a hoax and desperate to find Jordin, Maia launches into a quest for answers. Joined by Jordin's boyfriend - a pastor's kid with very different ideas about the paranormal - the two soon find themselves in a struggle on the edge of the spirit realm as dangerous forces try to keep the truth from emerging.

Review

Nightmare is a great thrill ride that will give you lots of goosebumps. Maia grew up in the world of the paranormal and supernatural, starring alongside her parents in their own ghost-hunting/busting reality TV show.  Eventually, however, Maia wanted to forge her own path and is now taking criminal justice courses at university, desiring to have case files about physical beings, rather than the ghostly ones.

Her fame precedes her, however, and fellow student Jordin Cole, an ultra-rich heiress, commissions her to help her experience the supernatural.  Reluctantly, Maia agrees, more or less because of Jordin’s very deep pockets. 

What follows is a tour of the top ten most ghostly haunts in America.  From a sanatorium, hotel, cemetery, and even Alcatraz, Maia is struck by the high level of paranormal activity they experience at each place.  It’s just not possible for them to be that lucky with the numerous sightings and reads, and she begins to wonder if they are attracting something else…something more sinister.

Then Jordin goes missing, and the mysterious and troubling events that follow her disappearance will test Maia more than ever.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, scares and all.  Everyone has some curiosity about ghosts and allegedly haunted places and wonder why these places are “haunted”, and if so, by whom?  What are ghosts, really?  Are they the souls of the dead, caught between heaven and hell?  Or are they demonic beings wreaking havoc with God’s creation?  This book makes no effort to provide an absolute answer to those questions, but rather presents the two opposing viewpoints and lets the reader decide for themselves. 

Potential readers will be excited to know that as per an Author’s Note at the end of the novel, “…every instance of paranormal activity depicted herein is based on events that have really happened at one haunted location or another, all of which have been verified by recordings and/or multiple eye-witness accounts…”   

Got chills yet?