Review: “The Claiming,” Ike Hamill

Pros: A most unusual type of haunting
Cons: …
Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Ike Hamill’s The Claiming follows one family as it moves into an empty neighborhood. “The moms”: Maria and Leo (Leona); the teenaged boy: Reed; the young girls: Lizzy and Kyra. The idea was to fix up and flip the house, but the home values in the neighborhood have dropped like rocks due to unexplained disappearances, among other odd phenomena. Then one night, Lizzy disappears.

I love this book. It was just the sort of creeping horror that I was looking forward to. The characters in particular are quite good–they had fully-developed personalities, they changed in response to the events of the story, and I cared about what happened to them.

There were some surprises. Obviously I’m not going to go into them here or they wouldn’t be surprises. I will say that I did not get bored reading this book–I continually looked forward to what happened next.

The pacing was fantastic; even one four-year jump in the story didn’t trip me up. Tense chases and horrifying events blended well with smaller, calmer interludes, leading up to a great climax.

I had trouble putting The Claiming down to do other things, and I immediately decided to read another Ike Hamill book next. I’m in a definite horror-reading mode this week and I’ve been trying out various authors’ work through Kindle Unlimited. Of the handful of authors I’ve tried so far, Hamill’s the only author who has made me want to go out and read his other works.