Moonfall

By Tamara Thorne

If you thought Jessica Lange as an evil nun in AMERICAN HORROR STORY was scary, wait until you meet the sisters at Saint Gertrude's School for Girls.

Moonfall, the picturesque community nestled in the mountains of Southern California, is a quaint hamlet of antique stores and craft shops run by the dedicated nuns of St. Gertrude’s Home for girls. As autumn fills the air, the townspeople prepare for the festive Halloween Haunt, Moonfall’s most popular tourist attraction. Even a series of unsolved deaths over the years hasn’t dimmed Moonfall’s renown. Maybe because anyone who knew anything about them has disappeared.

Now, Sara Hawthorne returns to her hometown...and enters the hallowed halls of St. Gertrude’s where, twelve years before, another woman died a horrible death. In Sara’s old room, distant voices echo in the dark and the tormented cries of children shatter the moon—kissed night.

But that’s just the beginning. For Sara Hawthorne is about to uncover St. Gertrude’s hellish secret...a secret she’ll carry with her to the grave...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tamara Thorne
• Release date: Oct 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301941582

Tamara Thorne

Tamara Thorne has been a horror novelist for more than two decades, and has always loved a good ghost story. She is the author of Haunted, Moonfall, Candle Bay, The Sorority, Bad Things, The Forgotten, and Eternity, among others. She lives in California, where many of her horror stories take place. Visit her online at tamarathorne.wordpress.com.

Reviews for Moonfall

[RichardBookout · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

iread this book every October to get my dark side up moving

[victorianrose869 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

July 26, 2002MoonfallTamara Thorne Another great book by Tamara Thorne. After reading Haunted 2 years or so ago and just loving it, I'd bought Moonfall and started reading it immediately. However, Haunted had been SO good that everything else disappointed me at the time, and I was coming off my horror kick, so I quit Moonfall halfway through and it's been sitting on the shelf ever since. Well, now that I'm back on my horror kick - with no end in sight! - I picked it up again and started over. Finished it in days. Thorne's books are the ones I read and think, "Dammit! Why didn't I think of that (plot)???" The same way I feel about Barbara Michaels' books. Anyway, the storyline revolves around St. Gertrude's, an old, gothic, Catholic girls' school set deep in the woods of the small town of Moonfall, home of all kinds of apples and apple products. St. Gert's is better known as St. Gruesome's by the local kids. The gargoyles adorning the building are rumored to come to life at night and fly around the town looking for babies, which they bring back to the old witch who lives in the cottage by Witch Falls, in Witch Forest. St. Gruesome's is much more than a school, though, and its terrifying nuns are not quite what they seem. The primary protagonist is John Lawson, the local sheriff, who's lived in Moonfall all of his life - a life filled with more than its fair share of tragedies. His little brother died 24 years before on Halloween night, when the boys had been planning a clandestine trip out to St. Gruesome's to spy on the girls. They never made it - or so they thought afterwards. After Greg was found at the bottom of Witch Falls, the boys' memories were fuzzy and strange. 24 years later, John is the sheriff of Moonfall and has a son of his own. He doesn't realize until it's too late just how much danger the boy is in. The secondary protagonist is Sara Hawthorne, a new teacher at St. Gruesome's. She had been a student there years before, and after the suicide of her best friend had run away from the school, hoping never to return. Now, though, she's come back to the school to face her demons, and to find out the truth about her friend's death, which she now believes wasn't suicide at all.There is a lot of the occult in this book, which I love. The old witch and her pagan beliefs, mixed in with the dark side of Christianity gone wrong. A compelling mix of pagan and Christian beliefs and how they co-exist, one not necessarily overpowering the other. For Christians who believe, their God and Satan are just as real as the pagan pantheon of gods and goddesses. It’s interesting when you really think about it. All the gods and demons are “real”, if you believe in them.I bought Thorne's 3 other books: Eternity, Bad Things, and Candle Bay. I'm going to make myself hold out, not reading them all one right after the other as I'm tempted to do. I'm going to break them up and read other stuff in between. I almost started reading Candle Bay last night when I finished Moonfall, but instead, I've started Hexes by Tom Piccirilli. I bought a whole handful of horror paperbacks (no King, Koontz, or anyone else famous) about a year ago that I haven't read yet. I'm going to pull them all from the shelves in the closet and stack them on my nightstand. It's like a buffet of books! I'll be stuffed full of horror for the next six months to a year, at least. I need to slow down, though. Give myself at least a week to read each book, instead of finishing them in days! Better yet - two weeks! I need to draw them out a bit, or I'll run out of stuff to read! Or so I fear. I plan to write Tamara Thorne a letter and tell her just how much I love her books.