Amalina and the Secrets of the Wailing Castle

The Count at Play & Slaughter Series, Book 1

By: C.L. Holmes

Narrated by: Andy Stevenson

Length: 12 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's summary

Abducted by an ancient, evil entity to his castle and into his service, what is one to do? Amalina is about to find out. The darkest, most dangerous time in her life begins...

With dark humor, suspense, and new takes on genre tropes, this dark fantasy series quickly grows to surprising, epic proportions, but it starts here in the first novel: Amalina and the Secrets of the Wailing Castle.

Bad Hound Press

©2019 C.L. Holmes (P)2022 Inkland Audio

Critic reviews

Winner of the 2021 Indies Today Best Horror Novel Award

I surprised myself by loving it!

Amalina ends up in service of Count Takeshi (unsure of spelling), who turns out to be much more than a man. Indeed, he may very well end up being an ancient evil. Though Amalina does not know how she does know that she must escape or, failing that possibility, kill him - which seems more of an impossibility than escaping.

This book is billed as a horror, but the violence is so limited and handled in such a manner that I think it fits Dark Fantasy, or perhaps Gothic Fantasy, though there is a little too much comedy for either of those categories to truly fit. Indeed, though the material, the setting, the characters, the storyline - indeed, most of the aspects of the book - are dark, the author uses comedy and comedic timing in such a way as to prevent the tension from getting too high.

I was thankful for that, because I do not typically enjoy really dark fantasy, and I typically eschew all things horror. I enjoy my sleep too much to allow it to be disturbed by nightmare-inducing horror stories. LOL.

I liked how the mystery of who the Count is was revealed a little bit at a time through his interactions with Amalina, and then his interactions with other people when the visitors arrive. Through it all, though, Ginatti (again, unsure of spelling) has a theory as to who his master is, I don't know whether I believe that theory, but he surely believes it.

Even knowing this book was the first in the series, I was still frustrated by the ending. For Amalina to be so close, and yet so far, and then to find out what Ginatti really meant... disappointing and frustrating.

For this book, I listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by Andy Stevenson. Stevenson gave a wonderful performance, using different voices that made it easy to tell who was speaking, and injecting wonderful use of tone for the build-up and dispelling tension, as well as great comedic timing. I will definitely be listening to the audiobook for future books in the series if I get the chance.

An Epic Tale

Clocking in right around 13 hours – this one was a longer book by my standards but one that didn’t really feel like it was that long. Usually, right after 11 hours (in my opinion), there are scenes that could be cut or things that just are overexplained – but Holmes does a good job staying away from that while avoiding different issues with the tropes that were included in Amalina and the Secrets of the Wailing Castle.

I checked out another review because I wasn’t sure if I was the only one who was hesitant to jump into another vampire story – but there were other reviewers that felt the same way. That being said, this wasn’t one of “those” books. It was well thought out and done in a way that felt honest and true to the older vampire stories that we’re familiar with. (I say that knowing that I love the vampire series from C.T. Phipps because it was the opposite of that – funny and almost blasphemous to the genre).

I think the thing that surprised me the most from this one was that it was much more of an epic tale than a horror story that most vampire stories are. Holmes did a great job of building this world and the characters in it to epic proportions and really made the whole thing as much about the lore and the history as it was about the horror and the “bad” things associated with them.

Overall, I thought that this was an interesting and unique story. One that I definitely enjoyed.

Pretty good story

I was given this book for free from audiobook boom and asked to leave an unbiased review for the author and narrator. Pretty good story, a Dracula offshoot. It started out strong and did slow down quite a bit, the repetitive statements were annoying. All in all though I did like the story. I enjoy Andy Stevenson’s voice. He doesn’t just read the book, he does his best to bring it to life. He changes his voice for the various characters and hits the inflections to make the story entertaining. I would listen to anything Andy narrates.