Seed

Omg this was a twisty turny story! I had so many wants for this book and the ending. I’m happy that what I got was a truly great read. I couldn’t put it down.

I recently learned that I tend to write in the horror genre. I don't read horror so it really didn't cross my mind. So I did some research on the subject and in my research I stumbled across Ania Ahlborn's Seed. I thought it had a cool title--Seed, and you can just keep saying it, "Seed, Seed, Seed, Seed." It's always cool. And unlike other horror covers, it didn't look cheesy, stupid, forced or anything else that might make you not pick it up. And, oh, yeah, it was .99 cents.Here's my thing with horror, or my preconceived notion of horror--I don't like that it tries to scare you. Because I just don't scare. And this book was no different. It didn't scare me but it did something better--it got me involved in the characters and when it needed to be creepy it was a deep creepy that I had to think about.There were a number of places where I paused and put myself in the room with the characters and understood the moment whole-heartedly. It's simply a good piece of writing that doesn't let up.The story goes like this: Jack has parts of his past that he's forgotten because of trauma or other forces. Either way he's forgotten it and the story slowly bleeds this information out nicely. He truly starts to think about his past when the same type of events that happened to him begins to happen to his youngest daughter, Charlie.The story stays away from an intricate arc and instead focuses on tone; mood, you know, stuff to mess with your head. Real fun stuff.Jack's wife Aimee is great throughout. You just buy her, and believe her. Period. Outside of Jack being haunted he plays the male role in the house with his wife and two daughters well.The younger daughter, Charlie, who reminded me of the little girl from Poltergeist, is great as the maybe possessed younger daughter, only sometimes she has shark teeth and a lot of attitude. The bummer is that she won't hesitate to string you up to a tree by your intestines.Anyway, the point is the story is worth reading. There aren't any road blocks for the characters to get over, not really. There is a very clever illusion that there is but it's not really there. Jack is in a band. Not so much a hurdle. They could use more money in their life, but you don't get the sense any decisions is going to be made on this fact. Rather the story goes through where it should go through, the demon of Jack's past that is following him from childhood.It's not to say I would have made every decision as far as story went. One thing I might have done different towards the end is make Aimee closer to Jack. Would have loved to see her and Jack team up and handle their business when the climax finally comes. The results wouldn't have mattered and I don't think it would have changed the story but it sure would have brought an extra sense of purpose and empathy.I read this on my kindle and it is well formatted and also not too long. Buy this book. Read this book.U.L. Harper was here.U.L. Harper is the author of several books including In Blackness which you can find at Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, and smashwords.com for $2.99 and everywhere books are sold. Or join the hundreds on the goodreads.com giveaway.

Having read some of the 1-star reviews before reading a sample of this book, I was surprised to find myself buying the book after reading the sample. For $0.99, "Seed" was a pleasant surprise, although there are a few weaknesses in the book. First, the bad:-"Seed" really needed a once- or twice-over by a good editor. There are some metaphors/similes in the book that stick out because they seem forced, e.g., "blooming like a supernova," "suspended in the air like an astronaut waiting ignition," "wailed like a Greek at a funeral," and various descriptions of characters' expressions or emotions. Every character in the book smirks repeatedly, but it's always to express different emotions. I got tired of people smirking because they were happy, sad, frustrated, wry, or angry; regardless of the cause, everybody smirked.The author also uses "that" instead of "who" when referring to characters, e.g., "a daughter that x," or "a wife that y". All of these things would/should have been caught by an editor before the book was published, and this is a weakness I find in most self-published books. While the story in "Seed" is quite absorbing, these quirks, combined with some punctuation and word usage issues ("grizzly" where "grisly" should have been used, "Julienne" where "julienned" was intended, a truck's headlights having been described as the left one pointing outward and the right one pointing down, then referencing the headlights as "cross-eyed" after they'd already been correctly described as "cockeyed", etc.), distracted from the story line and I'd have to re-read the paragraph to try to get back into the flow of the story again.-The author doesn't transition well between flashbacks and current day. After multiple pages of flashback, a paragraph would begin with "Jack woke up the next morning," but not referring to the next morning in the flashback, rather to the current day. I got the impression that the author did this intentionally, but for me, it didn't work. I'd get through that first modern-day paragraph and realize that we'd jumped out of the flashback, so I'd have to go back to re-read the paragraph that didn't make sense when I thought it was still a flashback. Again, an editor could have fixed this.-For me, this one wasn't really an issue, but I suspect it explains a lot of the one- and two-star reviews: the subject matter in this book is disturbing, particularly, I suspect, to people who have children and who are emotionally affected by stories (real or fictional) involving children, because they envision their own children in the roles about which they're reading. My sister, for example, cannot stand to read newspaper accounts of bad things happening to children because she cannot help but imagine her children when she reads them. Bad things happen to children in this book. Bad things happen to adults in this book. Bad things are done in this book. For people who identify strongly with the children in this book, the plot is probably very disturbing. I can separate reality from fiction fairly easily, and while I was able to keep in mind that this is a work of fiction, there are certainly some unsettling themes in this book, particularly for Westerners, for whom children tend to be verboten subjects in most horror. (Not all, but most; Asian cultures tend to be more willing to portray small children both as victims and/or as evil beings than most Western horror does.)-The elder daughter's age. This one is really nitpicky, but the elder daughter's age is not mentioned until well into the book, and just at the point at which I was irritatedly thinking, "how OLD is this girl," her age (ten) was given. As I said, this is very nitpicky, but it stuck out to me. I may actually have missed the elder daughter's age earlier in the book, but if I didn't, it would have been good to have seen it mentioned earlier. In fact, in the opening scene, I thought at first that the elder daughter was actually a toddler and the younger of the children.-Misplaced cultural references. Others have noted things like songs being misattributed, but the one that stuck out the most for me was a character's reference to an Amber Alert at a time in which they did not exist.-Side plots that are sometimes a bit TOO convenient. While the plot moves well overall and there are places in which Alhborn brings in a side story very well, in other places, characters or scenes exist purely to provide a pat explanation for a lot of previously-inexplicable behavior. In some cases, the side plots and back stories are done very well, but in others, they're forced.-Another nitpick: in this book, the house in which the characters live is described as having the kitchen and living room at opposite ends of a hallway. While this probably sounds ridiculous, for me, it made the house really difficult to envision, particularly as no other details of the layout were really given. I am not sure I've ever seen a house in which living and eating areas were at opposite ends of the house, so it was just distracting to me every time a character ran down the hallway from living room to kitchen and vice versa.Now, the good:-This book, if you can get past the issues above, is well-written and absorbing. It flows well, the plot doesn't drag, and for the most part, the author's descriptions avoid most clichés. The characters are fairly believable, the dialog is generally smooth, and it's usually easy to achieve the suspension of disbelief required to allow one to immerse oneself in a story.-The plot is done well; there are areas where it could have become contrived and trite, but just as the reader is starting to question why a character is behaving in a manner that simply doesn't seem to make sense, Ahlborn weaves in a side story that brings clarity to the character's behavior. As noted above, in some cases, this isn't done as well as in others.-While the subject matter is disturbing, it's deftly presented, without gratuitous gore and violence. There's just enough of each to be unsettling and grotesque, but Ahlborn manages to skirt the edges of what could simply be disgusting and nauseating content.-The length of the book is just right, and you're kept absorbed right up until the end. Reading the book, I felt as if I knew how the book was going to end, but I kept hoping that something would change that. I won't tell you if something did change what seemed to be an inevitable outcome, but I will say that I was devouring the pages by the end of the book. I note, however, that this particular observation should really be listed as both a negative and a positive; you'll understand what I mean if you read the book.In short, had this book had a strong[er] editor before it was published, I'd call it a four- or five-star book, without hesitation. However, the spelling and grammatical errors, combined with the overuse of certain words, some awkward metaphors, inaccurate cultural references, and some dubious plot lines made this a three-star book for me. I originally gave it four stars as I know that I am fairly nitpicky, but after some more thought, I couldn't keep this rated at four stars. It's a three-star book to me.Finally, if I had paid as much for this book as, say, a Stephen King novel, I would have felt ripped off because of the lack of strong editing, but let's not forget that this book costs less than a buck. For $0.99, this book is a bargain. Ania Alhborn may have a very promising future as a writer of horror fiction, provided she gets a better editor who will give her honest feedback and catch the grammatical, spelling and usage errors that weren't caught in this book.

I simply could not put this down. I didn’t know how to feel at first but as the story progressed I found myself not able to put this down! Great ending !

So I found this story quite interesting and it sure kept me reading but I must say I had problems with a few things near the end. I was ok with the actual end - but there were a few things before the end that I found confusing or wrong. I cannot say what as it would totally ruin the story for others. But needless to say I found myself thinking "This doesn't make any sense, this is not how they would treat this type of situation".The story itself was quite good. Its very dark..the main character and his family of wife and two you daughters have some very big problems. And they are very supernatural in nature. The problem of course it what do you do about it?But as the story continued things of course grew worse.... As they do in this type of book.Now what is the story NOT? Its not a thriller. Its not nail biting. I never found myself concerned about the characters. Even when super bad things had happened and boy oh boy they sure do in here. Still its very entertaining. Its a good thing to read on a dark day here in November. Look at the bare tree on the cover... The same bare trees are outside now. You can enjoy little scares while being tucked in under the covers and be thankful that the things described in here are not haunting you - only Jack.The characters in here change. Charlie sure does. She changes a lot... But I didn't like her at all. As you read along you will find out why.It is shocking.

I like a story that doesn’t tell you everything, and while some parts of the plot are natural extensions of what came before, others are more unexpected and some are deliberately unanswered. I’m no fan of Aimee (she was a bit too all-over-the-place for me), but the rest of the story is intriguing and keeps the reader ready for disaster. There are some impressively gruesome images as well, particularly in the final chapter. A solid book on the whole.

Some of the descriptions within this book will stay with you a while - well paced, well written, and insidious

I read Ahlborn's 'Brother' before this and I loved it. Thought the premise for 'Seed' sounded just as creepy, but then I wasn't creeped out until the very end, if even then. The writing style was repetitive, as were the events in the middle of the book. Popcorn refusing to stay in the bowl when you leave the room just isn't very scary to me.

I read it like I could have watched it

This was an adventure from beginning to end. A true horror story that is scary, fascinating and impossible to put down.