The Witness

By: Zach Bohannon

Narrated by: Robin Rowan

While traveling from New Orleans to Chicago for a rock concert, five college students decide to take a detour. While in Mississippi, they travel a remote highway into the Delta region of the state to visit the infamous Crossroads: the place where blues legend Jack Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil.

Lost on the old highway, they stop at a rundown gas station to get directions from the creepy attendant that runs the place.

But one wrong turn leads to a night that they will never forget....

©2015 Zach Bohannon (P)2015 Zach Bohannon

Frustrating, Ugly, Well-written Slasher

The Witness is highly reminiscent of the 70's era's, gritty, mean-spirited and nasty horror films that, free from most of the previous decades regulations, delighted in throwing intestines, torn flesh, buckets of blood and high-pitched screams of anguish at the viewer. It is also highly polished and well-written by an author who was clearly enjoying himself. This is my first Zach Bohannon book and it will NOT be my last.

Having said that, I really, really hated this book, for all the same reasons so many of those films now piss me off. The main character is a bland, ineffective, brain-dead, do-nothing loser who watches her friends die horrible, excruciating, drawn-out deaths and considers herself worse off because she, completely unharmed, has to sit and watch it. A friend is literally skewered, something she could have prevented, and she cries over a splinter in her hand. A splinter.

It's to Bohannon's absolute credit that I saw all of this book play out so vividly in my head. He is a GOOD writer, and I have no complaints about Robin Rowan's narration. She performed wonderfully. I just hated, more and more, every moment I had to spend in the head of this character.