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Description
Ashleigh and Danny Orchard are twins, not that you'd ever tell by looking at them - Danny distant and shy, Ash beautiful and accomplished. But there's a secret in the Orchard Ash is a monster, a psychopath who can feel only through bringing others pain.
When Ash and Danny are caught in a fire on their 16th birthday, both of them die. But only Danny comes back. Since then, Ash has haunted Danny, denying him any form of normal life ... or love.
When Danny meets Willa and her son Eddie he glimpses the life he could have without Ash. To stop her from ruining his new-found happiness, Danny must venture into the frightening underworld of Detroit, where he will unearth the mystery of the night his and Ash's fates changed for ever.
Dark and compelling, THE DAMNED is a story of how heaven and hell aren't about death, but about the decisions we make in life.
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I really, really wanted this to be scary. It wasn't. The basic idea was terrifying, which is why I picked it up. Evil twin, coming back from the dead, this should have hit all of my shivery spots and somehow it felt weirdly plodding. How do you take a girl back from the dead<spoiler>who might even be a demon</spoiler>and somehow leave it with no thrills at all? Some of it is that I felt like the explanations given for what caused the whole problem with Ash were a little sketchy. I don't mind things being left a bit unclear--I like having something to think about when the novel was over. But I got the feeling that things were supposed to be very clear about what was wrong there, it just didn't make a whole lot of sense and also wasn't very scary. Or touching. Or much of anything really. It should have made me tear up even if it didn't make me terrified, and it managed neither. I didn't dislike any of the characters I was supposed to be rooting for, I didn't dislike the writing style, the basic plot was intriguing, but throughout I kept setting it down. I felt like I was forcing myself to finish it, and that's never a good feeling with a horror novel. I read it in the dark. I was ready to be terrified. I am a huge wimp. And yet the scariest part of the whole novel for me was discovering the page count was just over 300 pages instead of the 600 it felt like. I've been kind of desperately searching for a good, scary book lately and I feel like I'm coming up short every time.