After the tragic accident that claimed his father’s life, Kelan Lisk became a withdrawn kid, a target for bullies. His mother, Susan, worries constantly about him, but she already has her hands full as a single parent with two boys and trying to keep the roof above their heads with her meager pay at the flower shop. Feeling trapped, especially by a recurring nightmare of the accident, Kelan wants to conquer the Run, a deadly sledding hill. To the untrained eye, the Run seemed just another hill. In truth, there’s something alive and evil lurking there.

The Dark by David C. Cassidy is a fascinating and intriguing horror fiction with a profundity that sets it apart from the others. The Dark plays the psychological game effortlessly. It makes you wonder whether it is just all in the characters’ heads or does the evil have a thick subtlety, playing with its victims’ minds easily. Did Kelan really conquer the Run? What really happened to Susan in the park? Did something follow them back to their house? From time to time, the horror is left mostly to the reader’s imagination until gruesome scenes takes hold of the story’s direction without a warning. Chances are, readers will simply be swept along by its narrative and lost in the world that Cassidy evokes so frighteningly well. All the characters have depth and there is enough terror to scare the wits out of everyone. On the whole, Cassidy’s The Dark will definitely please avid fans of the genre.

Plenty of us have dream worlds where anything and everything is possible. We can accomplish any daunting task set before us and meet anyone we want to meet. That's exactly what the lead character in David Cassidy's horror novel, The Dark, finds. He finds a place in his head where he can be all he wants to be and bring back the people and things he's lost. But this is horror, right? It can't be all rainbows and butterflies. Slowly this dream world seeps into the real one, but something isn't right. That which we come to love becomes a device for the devil as dreams turn to nightmares.

The uniqueness level The Dark offers its readers is minimal. I feel this is a common horror plot line that I've seen during my many late night terrifying movie marathons. But what David Cassidy does bring to the table is spectacular writing. The characters become your best friends within the pages and you end up biting your nails as you read, wondering who will make it out of this in one piece. You can't read this in the dark because the author has made it too real ... so you feel the darkness is trying to consume you before you reach the last page. This is horror at some of its finest. Maybe not Stephen King level (nothing in the genre really is) but it could definitely measure up to most anything else sharing the horror shelf. What this book lacks in original ideas, it makes up in edge of your seat illustrative writing. A must-read!

The Dark by David C. Cassidy is a horror story that will leave you terrified. Kelan Lisk was bullied as a child and, ever since his father’s death, has withdrawn inside himself. His father died in an accident that should never have happened and Kelan is suffering from denial. His brother Eric has gone to his Safe Place and their mother is struggling to hold things together. There’s a deadly hill used by sledders that Kelan wants to tame, but to do it he must enter a new world, a dark world where anything is possible if you really want it – even his father. But the dark world starts to seep into the real world and things can never be the same again – not the world and not Kelan, once an innocent child, now an evil agent. You will never see the dark in the same way again.

The Dark by David C. Cassidy has been written in such a way that you feel it is all too real and that, to me, is the mark of a good writer – the ability to pull a reader into the story and make them a part of it. The characters are well rounded and well described, and the plot itself is nothing short of genius. I have to say that this was one book I did not want to put down while, at the same time, I didn’t want to turn the pages for fear of being drawn deeper into the dark. Excellent story, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

It is often said, ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ and that is especially true in the small old mining town of Key Corners where you pay the price for having your wishes granted. Evil lives there and thrives on young children who fall prey to the allure of The Playground and the draw of The Hill. The Dark tells the tale of this ancient, unspeakable evil as it seeks the power of young Kelan Lisk. While other children in town go missing and an old black man - whose son was taken years earlier - fights against the pull of The Dark, Kelan develops special abilities. This is due to his connection to the power as he also gains in strength, self-confidence and the greatest power of all, love. David C. Cassidy evokes the greatest horrors of things hiding in the closet or buried deep in the earth as some characters succumb to the evil, others feed it, and others escape while they still can. The young bullies that torment Kelan and the older pervert who stalks his mother are just small parts of the greater drama that the town experiences as the force of The Dark tries to prevent interference from Kelan’s mother and a State Trooper who can also feel the negative energy. Has time, in fact, run out so that evil can take over or is there still a way for this small group to defeat The Dark?

David C. Cassidy writes with tremendous depth, emotion and imagination so that you are truly pulled deep into the story. The Dark compares with works of King and Koontz and is tremendously difficult to put down. The characters come to life (or back to life as the case may be) and it is easy to feel their hopes, doubts, pain and desperation as their psychology is carefully examined. The Dark brings a reckoning to this small spot on earth where everyone is under the all-encompassing watch of evil.