The Whistler by Nick Medina

TL;DR: A lot of promise but I felt a bit lost in the character and didn’t feel the scares.
Source: NetGalley – Thank you to the publisher!!

Plot: Henry was an amateur ghost hunter till a ghost caught up with him. Now his life is changed and he needs to deal.
Characters: This was both the strongest part of this and the weakness for me.
Setting: The atmosphere was here but the details when I try to build the setting in my mind are scarce.
Horror: There is some scares here I would call ‘spooky’ more than scary. I wasn’t jumping or reacting much throughout this.

Summary:

For fear of summoning evil spirits, Native superstition says you should never, ever whistle at night.

Henry Hotard was on the verge of fame, gaining a following and traction with his eerie ghost-hunting videos. Then his dreams came to a screeching halt. Now, he’s learning to navigate a new life in a wheelchair, back on the reservation where he grew up, relying on his grandparents’ care while he recovers.

And he’s being haunted.

His girlfriend, Jade, insists he just needs time to adjust to his new reality as a quadriplegic, that it’s his traumatized mind playing tricks on him, but Henry knows better. As the specter haunting him creeps closer each night, Henry battles to find a way to endure, to rid himself of the horror stalking him. Worried that this dread might plague him forever, he realizes the only way to exile his phantom is by confronting his troubled past and going back to the events that led to his injury.

It all started when he whistled at night….

Thoughts:

The Whistler is a bit of a sneaky story. The description seems to promise a creepy, haunting novel with a supernatural horror lurking at the end. That’s not entirely the truth of the matter though. Instead we see a man who, after a series of very bad decisions ends up experiencing a very bad accident and being thrust into a new life bound to a wheelchair. Henry’s ghost hunting days are seemingly over, and he has to learn to cope with his new life and also face the ghost of his actions and his past.

There is some supernatural aspects to this story, but the bulk of it is in Henry’s mind. Is it the guilt that’s chasing him in the night, is it truly a spirit? That is the story we end up grappling with. We spend almost all of the novel trapped with Henry and his struggles in his day to day, which are intense and in their own way captivating but they do not deliver on the creepy or spooky story we’re promised in the blurb. In the end we’re also left without clarity of what is the actual ‘horror’.

Sadly, because of this focus on Henry and his life that we’re following the book is slow. The scares are also less than impactful because we’re lulled into an honestly repetitive narrative with Henry. There are some spooky moments, some impactful ones, and I enjoyed the story for the most part but I don’t quite thing what I was expecting was delivered. Go in with the right expectations though and you could have a great time.