Title: The Haunted Trail: The War of the Dublin Woods
Author: John C. Lukegord
Publisher: John C. Lukegord
ISBN: 978-1499369250
Pages: 90
Genre: Fiction, Horror
Reviewed by: Scott Wilson
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Pacific Book Review
Deeply wooded areas have long been a frightening place for centuries; a place with hidden dangers, insane maniacs, killers and lawless activities flourish in their unabated realm of power. But these deepening fears take on an escalated fright when added the ghost of an Egyptian mummy haunting the Dublin woods during the mid-1800s.
The Haunted Trail series continues in this sequel titled The war of the Dublin Woods by author John C. Lukegord. In this novella, Mick Patrican, being on the brink of death as readers were left off in the first book, The Haunted Trail, is trying desperately to avoid capture by an evil mob of lunatics out to find and kill him. He is guided into a hidden cave by a spirit, thus avoiding eminent capture and death.
One by one his adversaries of the Dublin police succumb to gruesome and nauseating sequences of death scenarios and murders of the brigade. The grotesquely original ways these characters are annihilated becomes the thrust of the storyline, subjecting the readers to violent scenes in which, if were in a movie, the audience would close their eyes avoiding the nauseating sights. In this story, as the deaths begin to mount up, the police commander’s challenges make him frustrated and powerless in his quest, because whenever he seems to have an advantage, the curse of the mummy kicks in. In the dimly amber glow of lanterns illumining the area with shadows and blind spots, the supernatural comes into a force majeure of death by killing in ways which are unconventionally grotesque.
Lukegord cleverly names his characters with proper Irish names; however he doesn’t divulge much description into their personalities and character development. In a literary way, this does make for ideal characters on the receiving end of bloody and violent deaths; as the reader can delete that name from the cast without the emotional loss associated with knowing the person who died. Many stories in this genre have been written with the targeting of people, one-by-one, in a scary place – especially for the young adult market. However John C. Lukegord does bring in originality with the manner of how the deaths occur, which in hindsight emerges as the theme of this story.
Hovering around is the existence of a supernatural four-leaf clover separated into halves two thousand years ago beckoning it’s joining together once again to end the curse of the mummy. If the woods weren’t a creepy enough place on the Halloween night, adding the haunted status with the existence of a ghostly mummy appearing with deathly consequences creatively tops it off.
I would have liked to have seen more description go into character development, as the colorful Irish culture certainly alludes to forming the basis of many interesting characters; however in hindsight one sees the story mechanizations were outlined on a higher, superficial aspect of articulating a series of creative killings.
I feel The war of the Dublin Woods would appeal to a young adult genre which enjoys the horror-fiction and suspense with little concern for deeply descriptive characters, and a easily explained superficial reason for the centuries of a curse which governed the supernatural spirits. It’s a book that I feel would be best read after The Haunting, so a familiarity with the cast of characters can be inherent in the reader’s mind.
