By the time I reached Blood Moon, I had pretty much moved into High Moor.
I finished Moonstruck on the 12th of August and Blood Moon on the 13th. Considering this audiobook is not exactly short, I think it’s fair to say I was invested.
The third book takes everything that had been building in the first two and removes what little restraint was left. The existence of werewolves is becoming increasingly difficult to contain, humans are preparing to deal with the threat in the way humans generally deal with things they are frightened of – with weapons – and the werewolves are hardly presenting a united front themselves.
So, naturally, everything goes extremely well.
It doesn’t.
What started in High Moor as a relatively contained horror story about a small town and a terrible secret has become something much larger by this point. There are factions, old grudges, competing loyalties and the very real possibility of a conflict that neither side can control.
And there is a lot of blood.
A LOT.
This is where I think the trilogy fully commits to what it has always been. Graeme Reynolds never suddenly decides that his werewolves need to become softer or more appealing because we’ve spent three books with them. They remain dangerous creatures capable of doing horrific things, including to people they care about.
I appreciated that.
There is also something satisfying about reaching the third book of a horror series and feeling that the stakes genuinely have increased. Blood Moon doesn’t feel like Reynolds simply found another excuse to send a few werewolves running around the countryside. The consequences from the previous books have accumulated, and now everyone has to live – or perhaps more accurately, try to survive – with them.
Chris Barnes narrates again, and by this stage I couldn’t imagine the series without him. His Scottish accent had already become part of the atmosphere for me in the first two books. Three audiobooks later, his voice simply was High Moor.
And considering I apparently listened to this one almost immediately after finishing Moonstruck, there really wasn’t much opportunity for that atmosphere to wear off.
Was it perfect? No. I still landed at four stars. The story gets quite big compared with where the trilogy began, and there were parts that worked better for me than others.
But it gave me what I wanted from the conclusion.
Violent werewolves. Actual consequences. Characters I had become invested in being placed in increasingly horrible situations. And an ending that felt like the culmination of the story rather than an excuse to keep the series going forever.
Three books.
Three four-star ratings.
And not one supernatural boyfriend in sight.
I’d call that a successful werewolf trilogy.
4/5