I love discovering new authors in supernatural fiction, and The Voices falls perfectly into this genre. This story starts off like most haunted house novels — a happy couple moves into a too-good-to-be-true lovely old house that turns out to be creepyAF.
But that’s where anything expected in The Voices ends.
Right away, an unsettling feeling grows in your gut that this isn’t going to be your typical haunted house – you know, ghosts moving things around, locked rooms that randomly pop open, an apparition or two floating around, yadda yadda. There may be one or two episodes like this in the book, but, honestly, I don’t remember them.
All I remember are the voices.
Main character Christopher composes music for a living. During some recording sessions in his new (haunted) home, the tapes (it’s the 1970s, btw) start picking up disembodied voices talking in different languages. The voices also happen to be saying some pretty disturbing things, once Chris is able to translate them.
Eventually, our man realizes these recordings aren’t radio interference; they’re recordings of the dead. A.K.A, electronic voice phenomenon, or “EVP.” While EVPs appear in ghost-hunting shows and movies galore, I’ve don’t see them pop up as often in novels, let alone featured as the primary method of haunting. So, high points to author F.R. Tallis for originality.
Instead of being freaked out by hearing the dead on his cassette tapes, Christopher becomes morbidly fascinated with it, to the point where it starts to destroy his previously happy marriage and family life.
And, honestly, that’s just the beginning.
Tallis has an interesting style of writing. Each word chosen to describe a scene seems excessively precise; many sentences feel overly formal, almost to the point of being clinical. It’s almost as if you’re reading a scientific paper that’s been peppered with elements of fiction, rather than the other way around. Once I discovered that Tallis is a clinical psychologist with many non-fiction publications to his name, the writing style made much more sense.
However, the prose in The Voices is anything but dry. Tallis clearly possesses a talent for writing fiction, producing excellent imagery that vividly brings to life the horrid sights, sounds, and sensations that are coursing through Christopher’s home and stalking his wife and baby daughter.
The end of this book is bone-chilling. Simply bone-chilling. Reading the last chapter was like a sucker punch to the gut. I wasn’t quite sure where I expected this whole story to end up, but it absolutely wasn’t there. I don’t think my mind has EVER gone there, and I’m a little disturbed that Tallis’s did…
But it sure as hell made for a terrifying end to a supremely creepy story.
Horror lovers, definitely add The Voices to your list of must-reads.
