I didn’t leave much breathing room between High Moor and Moonstruck. Five days after finishing the first book, I had already finished the second.
That probably tells you most of what you need to know.
Moonstruck picks up almost immediately after the events of High Moor. John Simpson is in police custody, the town is trying to make sense of what has happened, and the authorities are faced with the rather inconvenient possibility that the man claiming to be a werewolf might actually be telling the truth.
I liked that Reynolds didn’t use the sequel as an excuse to reset everything. The consequences of the first book are still very much there, but the world around High Moor starts to become bigger. It isn’t simply a case of another full moon and another monster turning up. We begin to discover that there are other people who know werewolves exist – and they have their own reasons for making sure the rest of the world doesn’t find out.
That gave the story a different feel while keeping everything I enjoyed about the first one.
And yes, the werewolves are still horrible.
If anything, Reynolds seems even less interested this time around in protecting his characters. The violence is brutal and occasionally excessive, but this is exactly the sort of werewolf fiction I was looking for when I started the series. Becoming a werewolf isn’t sexy or desirable. Nobody is standing around admiring anyone’s supernatural abs. These creatures rip people apart.
Thank you.
I listened to the audiobook again, with Chris Barnes returning as narrator. By this point his Scottish accent had become part of the High Moor experience for me. There is something about the combination of that voice, the British setting and the sheer nastiness of the story that works extremely well in audio. It gave me the same sense of immersion that I enjoyed in the first book.
What I appreciated most about Moonstruck, though, was that it actually felt like a continuation rather than simply “High Moor again.” The mythology expands, the situation becomes more complicated, and the story starts suggesting that what happened in this little town is part of something much larger.
I still gave it four stars rather than five. There were moments where the story dragged a little and I don’t think every part worked equally well. But when it moved, it moved – and I was invested enough that I finished the whole thing in a day.
Then, naturally, I started Blood Moon.
If High Moor convinced me this was the kind of werewolf series I’d been looking for, Moonstruck convinced me to finish it.
4/5