Review: “Inhabited,” Ike Hamill

Pros: Great characters; nice and creepy
Cons: I wanted a little more insight into the … whatever it was.
Rating: 4 out of 5

Ike Hamill’s Inhabited is a story about a haunted mine. Every now and then a group of people will decide to go into the mine for whatever reason–people searching for mythical gold, students doing experiments. When they enter that place, they start dying. The cave system is in some way alive and constantly shifting. It’s hard to guess whether anyone will make it out alive–or sane.

Inhabited is a haunted house story that takes place in a mine. Actually, certain parts of it reminded me more of Event Horizon. There are quite a few people who have found their way into this mine on a particular day, and one by one the mine and its unknowable inhabitants kill and, well, eat, the outsiders. They get smushed in cracks that suddenly close. They disappear in impenetrable clouds like black smoke. They get pulled, bit by bit, into the rock itself. Poisons lining certain caves can kill in minutes. No matter where our erstwhile spelunkers turn, they’ll lose this game.

I really like the characters in this book. They have depth to them and it wasn’t hard to care about what happened to some of them. The pacing matched the beats of a good horror script.

My only real negative is that there were some details that never gelled for me. For example, there’s a room with a hangman’s noose in it–totally different from anything else in the mine, so it kind of begs for at least a little speculation on the characters’ part if not an explanation. There are a couple of other similar little details that I wanted to know more about. It’s hard to find the right line, in horror, of showing too little versus too much. This book fell a little to the side of not enough for my tastes.

If you’re looking for an interesting, classic horror style show then this is a good book to read!

“Didn’t someone just say that we’d be okay unless we found a bunch of skeletons? I think we might not be okay.”