Escapees & Fevered Minds

Escapees and Fevered Minds continues the dark, twisted and wildly imaginative adventures of several larger-than-life characters introduced in White Walls and Straightjackets by David Owain Hughes.Not to worry if you haven’t read the first book; you will thoroughly enjoy this sequel as a stand-alone novel. However, I suspect that once you’ve finished Escapees and Fevered Minds, you’ll race to pick up the previous book.If you enjoy your horror on the more extreme side, then Hughes is your man. Not only because he fearlessly and unapologetically explores the more disturbing side of the genre, but also because he is clearly having a jolly good time telling this story. And in turn, we do too.Make no mistake, Hughes holds nothing back and revels in taking his readers into a splatter-filled heart of darkness, and he doesn’t shy away from gore, over-the-top violence, graphic sexual deviance and profanity.In the hands of lesser authors, extreme horror tales such as this often risk falling victim to their excesses. But Hughes is a talented author, and his ability to navigate the surplus of gore and violence with solid storytelling is deceptive in how easy he makes it look. He understands that pacing, the build-up of suspense and intriguing characters are just as essential as the disturbing elements of the plot.It is a testament to the lucidness of Hughes’ writing, that although the narrative slips back and forth between past and present, and an intriguing use of flashback within flashback and hallucinatory states, the reader never loses sight of where they are in the story.

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