Book Review – The Roo by Alan Baxter

Title: The Roo

Author: Alan Baxter

Edition: Paperback

Page Count: 132 pages

Rating: 5 / 5 ✨✨✨✨✨

Short Summary:

Something is wrong in the small outback town of Morgan Creek.

A farmer goes missing after a blue in the pub. A teenage couple fail to show up for work. When Patrick and Sheila McDonough investigate, they discover the missing persons list is growing. Before they realise what’s happening, the residents of the remote town find themselves in a fight for their lives against a foe they would never have suspected.

And the dry red earth will run with blood.

Goodreads

If you’re not heavy into the book Twitter scene, the idea popped up to do a bunch of books about different animals with covers by Kealan Patrick Burke, owner of Elder Lemon Design, to benefit wildlife. This one was the first (I think?? that I know of?!) in that whole thing, and a bunch of us bookish community folk jumped in to give very emphatic YES votes to the ideas being thrown around.⁠

As a gift from the Author Gods for our services (aka, wildly yelling from Twitter to ‘PLEASE KILL ME, ALAN, OMG!!!’, not even joking!) a bunch of folks within the community were actually WRITTEN INTO THIS BOOK!!! So if you read it, you’ll recognize a few awesome fellow fans of horror fiction! INCLUDING ME!!! HOW FLIPPING COOL IS THAT?!?!⁠ Some of my favorite people within the community are in the book – and lots of us die horrible, brutal, amazing deaths!! Wanna know if I live or die?! You have to read to find out!!⁠

Fangirling aside, this is one heck of a creature feature. Even if my name didn’t appear on the pages, I’d have had a lot of fun reading this one. The combination of gore and bloodshed mixed with small town life in Australia made for a unique reading experience for me – I especially loved that the book comes with its own glossary for those of us who don’t know what the heck some of that Aussie lingo means!

This novella is short, and because of the length of the story, you’re thrown into the action right away. The cast of characters is pretty large, but I didn’t have any trouble keeping folks straight. I loved the close-knit, small town vibes, and especially loved seeing folks band together to defeat the Big Bad Roo. The storytelling is fast-paced and over the top in the best way, and if you’re looking for something to pull you out of a reading slump by kanga-pounding you over the head with a ter-ROO-fic (heh heh) good time, let this be the one to do it!