From Mass Movement Magazine-
By Edward St.Boniface

RDM is a writer who knows how to scare you – he certainly scared me and I write intense horror myself. This is a second novel, obviously structured on a 3-act narrative the same as a feature-length screenplay and it is clear RDM intends it to be a calling card to the movie business. Much of the book is taut and crisp and the absence of too many characters, situations and settings focuses the story into its essence: a voyage of self-discovery and metamorphosis into maturity for the main character Kelly Rich/Kellow. RDM generally succeeds very well at it and brings in some harsh, genuine scares as well, although my personal feeling as a reader is that RDM could have halved the length of the book and still had a very authentic horror/psychological novel with a better pace and story flow. There is a real sense of mystery and a complicated puzzle to be solved for Kelly and although it’s not completely surprising or shocking when resolved, there is an intensity which makes the read satisfying. Kelly Rich/Kellow is a young woman in New York trying to make an independent documentary about assorted disabled people when her past and supernatural intrusions start to warp her world out of shape. Soon she goes back to a long-abandoned home where her sister, eight years younger, lies in a coma after a mysterious attack. This kicks off a series of complicated events that force Kelly to re-explore her past, admit a destructive psychic power latent within her and the evil half-living entity she has created with it that has now grown strong enough to maim and kill those in the vicinity of her former home – a home itself clearly haunted and evil in some unexplained sense. RDM is great at describing the claustrophobic fear of Kelly as she gradually learns and remembers more about her terrifying and traumatic past, but less so about the whys or how she has managed to stabilise her apparently normal life afterwards without coherent memories. In most people this kind of trauma-suppression would become a neurotic or fully psychotic condition but Kelly convincingly overcomes things and takes on the genuinely frightening ectoplasmic extension of herself she ‘gave birth’ to many years ago before being institutionalised by her parents after a series of uncontrollable psycho-kinetic episodes. Despite the action being not-too-effectively divided between her acquaintances in New York trying to psionically help out and the grim prewinter setting of upstate NY where her past violently collides with id demon-threatened present, the resolution is good and RDM ties up all the loose ends effectively; particularly with one minor character whose role is not what a usual shocker novel would employ. RDM understands the best lesson of ‘less is more’ here. The real test of a good horror novel or any good novel is ‘do you care?’ I did find myself caring about RDM’s main and supporting characters. All of them had life in them and their own voices. The monster Kelly creates and leaves to grow in her absence is nasty but nothing new; the situation owes a lot to movies like ‘The Exorcist’ (which Malfi himself admits in the story), ‘The Changeling’ and the truly scary film adaptation of James Herbert’s ‘The Haunted’ directed by Lewis Gilbert. Despite this I genuinely enjoyed and got involved with the story. RDM doesn’t need to imitate, has real talent and I look forward to his next!

-Edward St.Boniface