Genre: Horror

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

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

I have a fairly simple requirement when I pick up a werewolf book: I want the werewolves to actually be monsters.

Not brooding supernatural boyfriends. Not an excuse for a romance involving mates, destiny and somebody growling possessively every three pages. I want claws, teeth, bad decisions and people having a genuinely terrible time when the moon comes out.

High Moor delivered that.

This is proper werewolf horror. It is violent, sometimes gruesome, and doesn’t try to make its creatures attractive. There is something much more unsettling about a werewolf story when becoming one feels like a curse rather than an upgrade.

What I particularly liked was the atmosphere. There is a roughness to the story that suited it. It isn’t elegant gothic horror with beautiful monsters wandering around dramatically in the moonlight. These things are dangerous, and when the violence starts, Reynolds doesn’t make it pretty.

I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Chris Barnes, and his Scottish accent added enormously to the experience for me. It gave the narration the kind of rough, distinctly British character that the story needed and provided the immersion I was looking for. This was one of those cases where the narrator didn’t simply read the book – his voice became part of how I remember it.

I tore through it remarkably quickly. There were a few places where I thought the story could have been tighter, which is probably what kept it at four stars rather than five for me, but I was never bored.

And perhaps the clearest indication that it worked: almost immediately afterwards I started Moonstruck, the second book.

For anyone looking for a werewolf novel that belongs firmly on the horror shelf rather than the paranormal-romance shelf, High Moor is very much worth a look.

4/5