REVIEW: Novella- The Beast of Loughby Island – Matt Doyle

Review By Ulysses Dietz

Member of the Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team

The only thing that really puts this into my purview is that Selwyn, one of the central characters, is a gay man who lost his husband a few years previously. Other than that, this is a skillfully written and fairly relentless horror story.

It begins when an unpleasant man and his two unpleasant adult children bring an “undesirable” to Loughby Island, something they have a habit of doing.

This, however, is not the plot. What happens to these three people next is the plot, and I don’t want to reveal too much.

What happens to them then proceeds to happen to a lot of other people on the idyllic, Irish coastal island of Loughby. It is a small, cozy kind of place, where everyone knows everybody else, and most people have a “live and let live” view of the world. The rather chilling point is that, when something bad appears suddenly on an idyllic island, the island becomes a trap.

I didn’t know what to expect when I started this, and I pursued my reading because—as a good horror story must have—there is suspense built into the narrative. Even when I thought I might have hit my horror limit, the need to see how it turned out kept me turning the pages.

It is not a long book and none of the characters get a lot of time on the page; but we know who they are, why they’re on Loughby Island, and what they mean to each other.

The author provides an afterword that explains his particular motivation for this tale, and as I suspected, it’s bound metaphorically to the mundane world in which we all struggle right now. The horror is not gratuitous, but purposeful. It’s a scary story that makes you think, even as you shudder.