The voice in Seda's head lurks in lunacy and wants her to murder, but she will not loss control of Sawyer, her inner voice, good luck with that Sawyer responds.
The dead man was laid to rest via the violent blows in the back with an old axe. Did Seda brutally murder her father and store his blood saturated body in the large freezer in the basement? Is Sawyer real or in her head? Are the splinters in Seda's hands small remnants of wood from the old axe? The questions run rampant while fact and fantasy crawl amidst the crevasses of Seda's cerebral chaos.
Seda Helm, nearly 16-years-old is the eldest of her four siblings. She has two brothers, Adam and Avery, both twins and 6-years-old. Her twin sisters Zoe and Zain are 4-years-old. Seda's mom told her that she absorbed her twin brother to be Sawyer while in her mothers womb.
I felt like I was watching a movie while reading "Alone." The main characters seemed like real people and the story-line made this book a real page turner, bending the mind and sparking my imagination. This book is geared for teen aged minds, yet rides well in older hearts too. I acquired "Alone" from the young adult section at the public library. The middle of the book drags a bit, but not enough to lose interest.
Teenager Seda is a child of divorce and her mom moves her far away from her high school and friends into the Bug House, aka The Bsmarck-Chisholm house which was built in 1789. The sky view of the Bismark is shaped like a bug, hence its nick-name. The Bug House is located at the top of solitude mountain. No signs or life or other houses can be seen in any direction from the mansion.
The original builders and owners of the house made it a tourist house of horrors. Up until the 1970s, tourist from all over the world paid to be scared. The last owners that restored the Bismarck mansion in the disco-decade met an untimely death.
Maya Helm, Seda's mother, against her ex-husband's wishes, moves Seda and her four siblings into the Bug House. Maya tells Seda the move is only temporary, but Seda believes other wise.
"This place can do phenomenally well with the right advertising, the right investment and the right story-lines," Maya said.
And the right amount of insanity Seda thinks. The Bug House sans TV, phone and the main source of entertainment is an antique movie projector playing vintage horror movies. Maya is a writer who uses the old reel to reel movies as inspiration.
The winter snow isolates the Bug House even more, and when Heath Hunter's van breaks down on the way to a ski resort, himself and his friends may ignite the Doppelganger, (German word) a portal to another world or something that awakes the evil twin within everyone.
Heath is accompanied by four high school and college aged teenagers. One by one the teenagers disappear as blood drips from a ceiling fan.
Eerie echo's ring through the hall ways with paintings of women engaging in debaucherous acts while impish angles cavort in the sky author Cyn Balog said.
"Alone" kept me guessing till the very end which makes this a mysterious three and a half star read.
Izzy Schurr, aka, Mark Schurr
