Seed is a very disturbing horror story available only as an eBook. For a time, it was the #1 horror story on the Amazon Kindle Store, and is currently in the #6 position. What’s amazing is that the author, Ania Ahlborn, is an independent publisher and she’s outselling big names like Stephen King and Dean Koontz. Perhaps it is because this book sells for 99 cents while the others are $12.99 or more.

The story begins with a family of four – dad, mom, and two little girls – getting into an accident out in the middle of nowhere after dad saw a shadow move out in the darkness. After they get home, it goes on to explain how the father had issues in the past with this shadow creature and apparently it has come back to harass his family. When the youngest daughter starts behaving weirdly, they try everything they can to find out what is wrong with her, but dad just won’t admit that it could be a demon.

What makes this work so well as a horror story is that it’s all told from the perspective of the father and it plays on the fear of a parent with a sick child and not knowing how to make them better. In this case, the sickness is not going to be cured by therapy or medication. The parent’s feelings go from worry to fear as they come to realize that their daughter might be dangerous, but they don’t want to upset her. When the child begins to target the family dog and even her sister, it gets downright mean.

Don’t expect this to be an action-packed horror story about fighting demons like an episode of Supernatural. Instead, it’s all about the four members of the family and most of the scares have to do with typical horror movie elements like slamming doors, objects moving on their own, and unnaturally dark shadows hiding in corners. Although it’s not particularly violent, there are a couple of moments of incredible gore, and their shock value is more effective because the rest of the book is not gory.

This book is fairly short, but quite effective because it doesn’t have a lot of fluff. Every line is focused on moving the story along or developing the characters and the author does a great job of balancing the frequency of scary moments. By my estimation, it’s just under 70k words long, so it’s a pretty quick read.

In the end, I was impressed by Seed. It started out a lot like the movie Insidious, but then went off in unexpected directions and I was impressed by some of the bold moves the author took with the story.

Recommended: Yes