Epeolatry Book Review: Don’t Let ‘Em Take the Children by R H Williams
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Title: Don’t Let ‘Em Take the Children
Author: R H Williams
Genre: dark fantasy, occult horror, coming-of-age, mystery, thriller, supernatural
Publisher: The Book Guild
Date: 28th September, 2024
Synopsis: Desperate to prove his mother’s death was caused by a supernatural force haunting his hometown, thirteen-year-old Ned discovers evidence linking a missing child to his own quest.
Joined by his friends, Ned embarks on a mission to investigate the boy’s disappearance. However, when they uncover their town’s dark secret, they must find a way to stop the unexpected and dangerous enemy without unleashing a greater evil on the world.
It takes a while to get into the flow, but once it’s there, my word, this is quite the page-turner.
We enter the scene with Ned, one of those precocious kids you tended to get in 1980s coming-of-age horror stories – which is a good thing indeed, because R H Williams has taken inspiration from all those 1980s coming-of-age horror stories with this, his second novel, set in (you guessed it) the 1980s. This time we’re in rural Wales, in the village known as Nant-y-Wrach. Ned narrates as he and his best friend Gwyn investigate the “abandoned farmhouse” as part of their paranormal investigation “work”. We learn they’ve investigated the most haunted sites of Nant-y-Wrach in recent months, but the farmhouse is the first place to truly give Ned the creeps. He’s the believer, in search of proof of the paranormal, dragging sceptical Gwyn along and using Gwyn’s older brother Rhys for details (“he’s our Q who mans our HQ in the back of the bookshop and researches the places we investigate and provides us with the information we need to carry out our investigations”). Things happen in the farmhouse, as they do, and as the boys head home we start to hear more about the situation.
There’s a missing boy, and all eyes are on Nant-y-Wrach as the police and villagers search for him. Ned is on a mission to find out more about his own mother’s death, and soon the two cases converge as Ned and his crew – joined by Rebecca, a pre-teen medium from the local traveller community who communicates with the other side via her dead grandfather’s skull – begin to uncover the town’s dark secret.
Williams himself has said he had a healthy love of horror while growing up in the Welsh countryside, obsessed with the Ghostbusters movie and the Usborne World of the Unknown books. Those influences are very much on his sleeve in this, but that’s no bad thing. Williams has created a world steeped in Welsh folklore, in witches and curses, in ghosts and hauntings, in cults and dark secrets, and in nostalgia for a time when kids could crash around the countryside on bikes doing paranormal investigations with no one – apart from the town bully – really batting an eyelid. The stakes are high for Ned’s crew, and he might just be leading them all into danger in a blind rush to find out what killed his mother, and whether that is linked to the disappearance of children from the village at regular intervals throughout history.
It’s a fun romp, in the end, and if you’re of a certain age and fancy a Ghostbusters x The Goonies tale with a dash of Stranger Things, then Nant-y-Wrach and its occult leanings beckons you closer.
/5
Available from Amazon.
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Lauren McMenemy wears many hats: Editor-in-Chief at Trembling With Fear for horrortree.com; PR and marketing for the British Fantasy Society; founder of the Society of Ink Slingers; curator of the Writing the Occult virtual events. With 25+ years as a professional writer across journalism, marketing, and communications, Lauren also works as a coach and mentor to writers looking to achieve goals, get accountability, or get support with their marketing efforts. She writes gothic and folk horror stories for her own amusement, and is currently working on a novel set in the world of the Victorian occult. You’ll find Lauren haunting south London, where she lives with her Doctor Who-obsessed husband, the ghost of their aged black house rabbit, and the entity that lives in the walls.
