The Hungry Dark

By: Jen Williams

Narrated by: Emma Fenney

As a child, Ashley Whitelam could often see odd things nobody else could: quiet, watchful figures she called the Heedful Ones kept a strange vigil wherever she went. As an adult, she keeps these visions to herself, but she’s turned her taste of the beyond into a career as a “psychic”­—parting people from their money with a combination of psychology and internet research. When the Lake District is gripped by a series of grisly child murders, Ashley offers her services to the police for the free publicity. But as Ashley leads the police on a fruitless search around the small town of Green Beck, she catches a glimpse of those old ghosts of her childhood and, following them into the woods, she finds something she never expected: the corpse of the latest missing child.

The press fly into a frenzy and the police grow suspicious: either Ashley’s psychic abilities are real or she's guilty of murder. Hounded by interviews and interrogations, Ashley teams up with Freddie Miller, a podcaster covering the crimes. As they investigate, Ashley realizes that there’s no way to distance herself from these murders: whoever or whatever it is that’s haunting the Lakes is haunting her too.

Master of unsettling suspense Jen Williams is back with another chilling, dark listen that will draw listeners into a gruesome and atmospheric nightmare.

©2024 Jen Williams (P)2024 Dreamscape Media

Solid suspenseful story

I enjoyed this quite a bit. It kept up a good pace, with mysterious events happening in parallel storylines taking place in different times, and it managed to cover some dark subjects without dwelling too much on the disturbing details. It's a solid thrill ride.

There were just a couple things holding it back in the end. Storywise, I'm a bit ambivalent on how to feel about the protagonist - it's an interesting dramatic choice to make her involved in the scammy psychic business, while also separately having some type of actual sensory power. But it feels kind of ambiguous how the story treats the first part, sometimes she acknowledges that she's scanning people, but sometimes it feels like the book wants you to feel bad for other people calling her out on it. I never really felt sympathy on that account, which occasionally brought my enjoyment down a bit. On the production side, the audiobook reader does a good job for the narration and most of the characters, but doesn't do so well on an American accent - this becomes more of a problem as an American character becomes more prominent over the course of the story.

Oh well, these didn't spoil my enjoyment all that much overall, so it still gets a solid recommendation in the end.