I would describe this book as a crime thriller mixed with folklore and supernatural elements and a dash of mystery. I really liked the concept of an author writing a book and having the murders in the book start to happen in real life. I also liked the demented psychiatrist working in the asylum, who is sicker than the patients. I even enjoyed the folklore of how the nightmares became real. It's really interesting how the author put all these concepts together and it worked. The character development was really done well. It felt like I knew the characters, which made their connections to each other believable, especially the relationship between Detective Winny and Detective Blue.

However, I feel like there were too many characters in the second half of the book. Most which were not necessary. They didn't really add or detract from the story. Some of the storylines (I'm looking at you Jennifer and Richard) were also filler and didn't really add anything. The ending was a little bit of a letdown after all the buildup throughout the story. It felt rushed and little time was spent with the villain, although it appears as there may have a sequel. Hopefully, there is because I liked Brianna's character and I think she and Detective Blue would make a great team!

With a little more editing, this book would be perfect!

Thank you to Crooked Lane books and NetGalley for providing an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Mystery. Drama. Murder. Horror stories come to life? All this and more can be found in the pages of The Nightmare Man.

Bestselling novelist and heir to the Blackwood estate, Ben Bookman, spent a weekend at his family's home to finish his latest horror novel, The Scarecrow. But then the story comes to life.

Detective Mills Winchester is called to the scene of a horrendous murder scene. A scene which mirrors a scene from Ben Bookman's book. Not soon after another family is murdered and Detective Mills and his daughter, Detective Samantha Blue, work hard to find the link between the author and the murders.

Soon all signs point to Ben being the key to solving this string of murders. But all Bookman remembers about that night in which the first murder occurred was that when he woke up in the atrium of his grandfather's house he had a splitting headache and his newest newest novel was finished.

All in all this was pretty good read. It had me on the edge of my seat throughout all of my reading and my biggest nitpick about this book is that it has a good beginning and a great middle, but the ending feel a little flat. But this and any other nitpicks I have for this book are easily put aside when I think of everything that J. H. Markert built in this novel. This was a book filled with mystery, family drama, murder, and horrors I didn't think were possible. I honestly want to see more of this world and the type of horrors our heroes face in the future.

4 stars out of 5.

Title: The Nightmare Man
Author: J.H. Market
Release Date: January 10th, 2023
Page Count: 330
Format: Netgalley
Start Date: January 3rd, 2023
Finish Date: January 8th, 2023

Rating: 4 Stars

Review:

This book was all over the place. It was well worth the read though. There were so many twists and turns. It left me hanging on the edge from beginning to end. I will say that this is not a book for people who aren't into horror or thriller novels. I guess the cover kind of gives that away in its own way. I'd love to get my hands on a physical copy or the audiobook and read it again one day. This would be a great book to add to a Halloween TBR pile. I may just do that this year. We will see. October is the one time of year that I try to read books centered around horror or thrillers. To the best of my ability anyways. It's a lot of fun. But I digress. I really recommend this book! I think it would make a great movie one day!

Well you can officially call me a fan of J.H. Markert and I am ready for more! THE NIGHTMARE MAN gave me so much of what I wanted in a horror book right now. From the opening chapter with these cornhusk cocoons of bodies/body parts and this creepy Scarecrow Man in the middle of a barn?! We get a father-daughter tag team mixed in a small town of missing kids as well as crimes and horrors being committed in the same way of local horror author's recent book. We get some book-in-a-book meta vibes going on and I am always down for that mashup!

This is such a fun, creepy read and I can't wait for more.

There's a lot I liked about this book - the story, the characters, the atmosphere - but it was severally disadvantaged by poor editing. It needed to lose about ten chapters worth of writing to prevent it from feeling drawn out and plodding.
Dialogue scenes felt as though they were written for a screenplay more than a novel. Conversations were often long when they needed to be concise, repeated frequently, and included unnecessary minutiae.
There were sub-plots that felt pointless and unnecessarily padded out the already overstuffed story.
By the time anything was revealed in the story, it was already really obvious or felt completely pointless or irrelevant.

I just couldn't keep my enjoyment or interest up with how slow things developed so I ended up speed reading through the last twenty chapters.

It's a shame because the actual premise of the story is really good.

DNF
I originally received a digital copy of this book from NetGalley, but I'll admit that it didn't grab me and I never finished it. Months later I decided to go back and try again, so I would at least be able to provide a review. I got further into the second time (close to halfway),but this book is frankly awful.
The writing in this is so terrible and cliched I am not going to waste anymore time on it. Bummer.

Ben Bookman is a bestselling horror novelist, who wrote basically his entire last novel over the course of a weekend at his ancestral home, which is huge and creepy and holds a lot of bad memories for him. He came back from his write-a-thon looking and feeling rough, without much of a memory of what happened. The novel switches between Ben’s perspective and the perspective of a local detective. Detective Mills’s storyline begins at a grisly crime scene that mirrors a murder scene in Ben’s latest novel. But the problem is that the novel hasn’t been released yet. So who’s recreating these crime scenes from a novel no one has seen? The answer involves Ben, his creepy-ass family, and their creepy-ass house.

This was so good! Highly recommend for anyone who likes spooky stuff with a dash of magic. The plot kept me guessing for the most part. Even when I had stuff figured out, there were still weird twists that kept me guessing. And the end is an awesome, chaotic horror battle royale.

Ben Bookman writes horror novels and he has been working on a new book and staying in the ancestral home Blackwood manor where he soon learns that there are some murders happening in town that are identical to those in the book.

The two dectectives in town are a father daughter team and they end up and some really strange and brutal murder sites, that lead them to Ben Bookman. He has no clue what is going on or why the murders are happen like in his book, but it's hard for the cops to understand what is going on.

Ben as well as the cops have to take a deep dive into Ben's history as his brother went missing 13 years ago and Ben has been looking for him since then, but he comes upon some bones he begins to think his brother could be among them. There is something about the Screamer, who takes kids.

It really is hard to describe what this book is about really, I am having a hard time putting it down without thinking something I say might spoil something, so just going to say that I thought this was very interesting.

This horror got me to like a lot of the characters so I knew someone was going to die that I didn't want to die, and at the end I was really on edge. I really liked all the characters a lot. They were interesting.

My first read of the year was The Nightmare Man and based on the synopsis it had all the markings to be a favorite but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. I was really really enjoying the book until about the 70% mark and then it just got too convoluted for me. I feel like the author tried to cram in too many twists and turns but it became way too much! I also feel like there were so many folklore elements that I was just overwhelmed. But listen, take my review with a grain of salt because there are so many people who loved it and gave it 5⭐️ and like I said it was a solid read for 70% of the book but it lost me for the rest of the story. With that said I really did enjoy the characters and their backstories. I especially liked the before-timeline of detective Mills and his whole storyline. The audiobook narrator was pretty solid as well, it almost had a hint of noir in the narration style which I truly enjoyed.

What a fantastic read! I love a good horror/thriller and The Nightmare Man was just that. It was like a mix of The Silence of the Lambs and the movie Fallen. I was completely hooked from the beginning, and Ben, Devon, and Emily's story was so bizarre, so twisted, that I just couldn't get enough! Throw in Winny and his daughter, Sam, both police detectives searching for one killer--or is it more than one? This was such a good book!

I didn’t like this. I don’t know how else to say it. It gave me the creeps and not in a good way. Thanks to the publisher and netgalley for this copy in exchange for a review

The Nightmare Man by J. H. Markert is a unique story about a horror author, Ben Bookman. His stories start to come to life, and no one quite understands how the murders and crimes in the small town of New Haven are directly mimicking his stories. Soon though, Ben and Detective Mills start to realize what is happening, and it is quite frightening. I appreciated the novel approach to this story, but there were a lot of side characters and stories that really slowed down the main story for me. Thanks to NetGalley for the free digital review copy. All opinions are my own.

DNF’d due to inappropriate comments regarding a cleft palate being considered ugly. This is extremely insensitive to those with a cleft palate or their family members.

I am not sure why authors feel like they need to make the most common birth defect into an ugly, mean thing. My beautiful daughter had a cleft palate(which you cannot see unless you look at the roof of someone’s mouth BTW) and this tacky, insensitive writing will make me stop reading a book every time.

“Why do you think she married our ugly father in the first place? Our father with his chopped-off fingers and cleft palate and bad eyes and demons.“

I thought this one was pretty good. I think it would be a great pick for anyone who enjoyed The Whisper Man and The Chestnut Man. This one is definitely creepy! ⭐⭐⭐

The Nightmare Man checks a lot of boxes for me without half-assing any if them. There's folklore, there's familial secrets, there's mystery, there's plenty of twists and turns. Sometimes when a book tries to hit too many niches, end ends up a mess. I feel like The Nightmare Man very successfully blends many tropes and elements into one very engaging and entertaining story.

It took me a while to get into this book at first. But once I pushed through the first couple of chapters I was not disappointed. It geared up from there and didn’t let go! I would highly recommend picking up this well written, suspenseful horror novel.

This book was a fantastic read! I loved the characters and the storyline...i've read thousands of horror novels and this is one of the best...i hope there will

Now I most definitely know why I could never get into the copy that NetGalley gave me a year ago when this came out......skip it.

So this book is what would be the outcome if you threw Nightmare on Elm Street, In The Mouth Of Madness, and Jeepers Creepers in a blender, added some shit....and blended. Yes, this book started out like a rip of all the way of John Carpenter's "In the Mouth of Madness" where an author comes home to finish his newest horror novel and the murders in the book start coming true while he is there. Now the scary 'monster' is a creepy ass Scarecrow, and that is the name of the killer in the book. However at about 50% this story just became a stupid as hell mess! This book WANTS to be a horror epic but NEVER makes it.

It did have grandpas molesting their grandkids, bodies being killed and hung up in 'cocoons' made out of stitched together corn husks.....(rip off of Ronald Kellys "Fear") and it goes on and on. But when it started having not 1 killer; the Scarecrow.....which was creepy, then there is a Screamer, the Boogeyman, the Tooth Fairy, and like 9 more! There was even talk of Dreamcatchers being killers of kids!! And then Bigfoot!!! Don't waste your time on this one......IMO skip it!

2 snoozes for the effort. Would not read this author again.

The Nightmare Man by J.H. Markert is an interesting story about a horror author. It's a creepy story that any horror fan will enjoy.