Slenderman, Slenderman, Take This Child by Lee McGeorge

Yo guys!

It’s Joe here with my most special review for you all!

The Author of The Thing: Zero Day got in contact with me again to review his new book ‘ Slenderman, Slenderman, Take this child’.

It comes out early next year and as I received a manuscript version, I cannot wait to get my hands on a copy of the book to slide on my shelf!

Here’s a quick account of the book:

Young Jemima Collins, a young thirteen-year-old girl, is crushed when her mother dies in front of her eyes during a freak car accident.

Flying to Germany to hold a funeral for her mother, Jemima stays with her relatives and crazy Great-Uncle Tomaz, a famous horror novelist.

While staying at her relatives, Jemima finds something in the woods… A tall figure… telling her to take one of her Grandfathers books and to burn it…

Jemima, suffering with grief and frustration steals a book and returns to England, only to release a terrible fate onto her town.

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First of all a huge, huge thank you is sent to the author for sending me a manuscript copy of this book!

The author has told me that it is not the final version and that the final edition of the book will be slightly different, so things I say in this review may not be the same exact thoughts I or yourself have when reading the finished copy of this book.

While I’ve been at Uni, I’ve been poorly dabbling through books and trying to get myself into a regular reading pattern (which hasn’t seemed to have worked so far, but I’m still trying!)

Once this story arrived and once I started reading it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The way that the author has taken the urban myth of Slenderman and spun it into a dark, twisted, horrifying tale of manipulation, trust and murder has really changed the way I viewed the Slenderman story.

For those of you who do not know who Slenderman is here’s a quick and brief summary:

Slenderman, a tall, imposing figure who is dressed in a suit and is always surrounded by black smog, is an urban myth that started in Germany in the early 1600’s and has branched out globally after the popular and quite nerve-wrecking game ‘Slender: The Eight Pages’ that was released in 2012, since then Slenderman has become a house-hold topic that has had people talking about it for recent years.

It was rumoured to appear near parks that were situated next to forests or woods (Kind of like the German version of the Bogeyman) and tempt children into said woods to disappear without a trace.

People have blamed the Slenderman for real child disappearances, and there was also a brutal murder case founded a few years ago involving two girls who thought that Slenderman told them to kill someone. (Google the rest)

Anyways, now we know who Slenderman is, lets get back on with the review!

The story itself was a warped piece of work, yet enjoyable and so very intriguing.

I sincerely liked the way that the author can write about such a well-known story and immerse you in this new light that’s been shed on it, and make you want to believe that this is connected to the tale of Slenderman.

I enjoyed how the story was broken up, how new chapters would start with a excerpt of Great-Uncle Tomaz’s books as an intro to the chapter, which would explain certain things about Tomaz’s past or the past of other people – I liked this approach as it gave more background into the characters and the depth of the story itself become more intense and wider.

The story did creep me out at points, some points I genuinely had to stop reading take a quick breather and plough my way through it; the gritty-ness and darkened atmosphere that the author has poured into this book messes with your perception of the characters.

I remember reading sections twice because I couldn’t believe that a character could do or say such things.

The writing, to me, was very clever. It was simplistic, but yet it was very divulging and it shined on each character greatly, there was not a point where I felt the authors writing focused too much on one character.

The characters that the author created had their own individual traits and their own ‘identity’; what I mean by that is, that these characters didn’t really resemble your stereotypical main characters in a horror story.

The main young girl Jemima wasn’t a trickster who was possessed, the main cops were not heroes nor were they sincere or honest.

Each character had a light and a dark side, which was refreshing to see, rather than horror stories that have the classic ‘good’ guys and ‘evil’ villains.

My favourite character throughout this story would definitely have to have been Jemima.

Not because she’s the main focus of the book; but because her character was so complicated and so intense that it made reading the book more dark and more strange.

Jemima scared me at points honestly.

Overall, the entire book was really enjoyable and a really decent read, with dark scenes, shadowy characters and a distorted feel!

I would genuinely recommend this book to any Slenderman fan or any Horror fan, because either fan would enjoy it.

I want to, say once, again a massive thank you to the author for sending me this manuscript!

And a huge thanks to you guys, for sticking with me while I struggle my ass off at uni haha!

See you on the flip side guys!

Joe J