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Long Lankin (Long Lankin, #1)

Lindsey Barraclough

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Aug 01, 2012 karen rated it liked it

Shelves: distant-lands, why-yes-i-ya

this book is an anomaly.

most books with multiple POV's, where the perspective changes as much as three times per page, will be fast-paced. the benefits of this style, for a writer, are that you can keep the reader interested and frustrated all at once. you want to keep them guessing, you want to make them scream, "no, get back to that character, i want to know what is happening!" and it fragments the narrative so you can show a ton of things happening at once, and usually, the result is a book ...more

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Oct 11, 2018 El rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: library-borrow, horror, young-adult-n-kids, 21st-centurylit

The next book off of the BookRiot's 50 Must-Read Contemporary Horror Novels list.

Young sisters Cora and Mimi are sent to stay with their eccentric-ass aunt who lives in an isolated village in god-knows-where. They're, of course, miserable, which isn't helped by the fact that their aunt, again, is eccentric and weird. They do befriend a couple village boys, Roger and Peter, so things aren't all that bad after a while.

But some strange shit is happening in this village of god-knows-whatever. The ch The next book off of the BookRiot's 50 Must-Read Contemporary Horror Novels list.

Young sisters Cora and Mimi are sent to stay with their eccentric-ass aunt who lives in an isolated village in god-knows-where. They're, of course, miserable, which isn't helped by the fact that their aunt, again, is eccentric and weird. They do befriend a couple village boys, Roger and Peter, so things aren't all that bad after a while.

But some strange shit is happening in this village of god-knows-whatever. The children are on a mission to figure things out but not surprisingly they get in over their heads very quickly as tends to happen when strange shit is happening in isolated villages.

This is a fine book, but I didn't love it. I've been reading a lot of books lately where the perspectives change, and in this one, the perspectives changes pretty frequently between the children and the aunt. I wasn't turned off by that, per se, but it was hard to keep track after a while because, in my opinion, there wasn't a lot of differentiation between the ways the children, especially, spoke or thought. Not to mention I had a hard time really seeing the characters. Considering the amount of time Barraclough spent with descriptions of setting and environment, and considering how well she managed that, I would have liked a bit more description of the characters themselves - particularly the children.

It takes a lot to scare me when I'm reading horror books (which is why I've been reading through horror genre lists like no one's business lately), and I won't say this one scared me either. But there were moments that made me uncomfortable because Barraclough really nailed what it is like as a child to deal with creepiness.

If she meant to do me harm, she could have done it already - come up behind me in the dark.

I swallow, pull myself away from the wall, stretch out my hand, and lift the latch again. I can hear my heart thudding in my chest and am barely able to place one foot in front of the other as I move towards the doorway in the corner once more. When I reach it, I hold my breath and slowly peer around the frame.

A lightning bolt cracks, and the room flashes with light. There is nobody there.
(p120)

Long Lankin himself is... well, I don't want to spoil too much. But Long Lankin ranks high on the creep factor in my opinion. It was hard for me to separate him from Slender Man which is more my fault than anything else. Once I had the idea of that in my mind, I just couldn't shake it.

Previous read on the horror list I'm reading through: Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes
Next up on the horror list: The Imago Sequence and Other Stories by Laird Barron ...more

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Oct 08, 2021 Teresa Jensen rated it really liked it

I keep recommending it to students.

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Sep 04, 2012 Kate rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2012, horror, age-middlegrade, age-ya

Cora and her little sister Mimi have just been sent to live with their Auntie Ida, who didn't know they were coming and certainly doesn't want them there. Cora quickly befriends neighbor Roger, and Roger tells her about the creepy stories people tell about Auntie Ida's house and the decrepit church nearby they are all forbidden to play in. Then Cora notices strange things happening at Auntie Ida's house, including the ghost of a woman who chants a strange rhyme about someone named Long Lankin. I ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Dec 22, 2012 Laura rated it liked it

Shelves: old-reads, library-loan

There is so much love for this book, and while I can see why, it just didn't work for me on a number of levels.

Take the pacing. S.L.O.W. Seriously. Or the fact that the action switches somewhat arbitrarily between points-of-view (Cora talks about walking up a path, Roger finishes the segment - why? who knows? it doesn't matter who tells some of the story). And then there's the fact that this isn't a new story, it's one I've read many times before. Finally, it would have been better to have had ...more

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Aug 28, 2012 Lauren rated it liked it

This was delicious and creepy. But it needed a map. I have a terrible spatial imagination and there was lots of to-ing and fro-ing from the village to the marsh to the church to the other church. I think I lost some of the plot points trying to follow where everyone was going.

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