Description
The Damage Done
By Tony Tremblay
Published by Twisted Publishing
Lured by a prank phone call to a local park, Choi Lee, a Korean high school student living in New Hampshire, is unwittingly pushed to her breaking point. Since she was little, Choi’s parents have instilled in her a need to check her emotions, emphasizing that the damage done if she lost control would be catastrophic. With that phone call, Choi, her boyfriend, and her classmates will discover just how catastrophic after Choi is provoked to the point of no return.
Everyone in the park — the guilty, the innocent, the bystanders — they all die.
Inspecting the bodies littering the grass, Captain Pendleton, new to the Goffstown Police Force, walks the grounds of Barnard Park. His men are calling this event a microburst, but Pendleton had never seen a microburst decapitate, flatten, or twist a body inside out such as this. While at the park, he receives more unsettling news. There is a fatal incident at the local tavern with several people unconscious and at least two dead. Arriving at the tavern, Pendleton wonders if things could get any worse. It turns out they can. His men discover more bodies in a house next door to the tavern that a Korean family owns. The only survivor – a young girl named Choi, who has been shot in the head.
In the coming days, the gruesome deaths pile up.
Captain Pendleton’s investigation leads him to the owner of a local pawnshop. Together, they attempt to piece together Choi’s involvement with the deaths in the park, her home, and at the restaurant. However, Pendleton and the pawnshop owner are dealing with unfamiliar forces, and Choi’s ties to the supernatural and Korean folklore test the resolve and sanity of both men. It was Choi who initiated the events that led to the death of so many townspeople, and she is the key to stopping more.
The thing is, Choi is technically alive, but her brain is dead.
Praise for THE DAMAGE DONE
“Tony Tremblay returns to his fictional version of Goffstown, NH in his third novel (following 2019’s THE MOORE HOUSE and 2022’s DO NOT WEEP FOR ME) in THE DAMAGE DONE, borrowing from Korean myth to deliver a devastating tale of small-town horror, where a teenage girl, Choi Lee, becomes the vessel for an ancient entity, the Haetae, that passes terrible judgment on those it encounters. This horror-based thriller is equal parts police procedural (chronicling the efforts of a small-town police force’s efforts to cope with and solve the mystery behind multiple deaths) and eighties horror novel (Goffstown could easily stand in for Stephen King’s Castle Rock, or Derry, and its heroine, Choi Lee, evokes memories of King’s Carietta N. White). It’s a fun, terse, sometimes terrifying novel that should make the hairs on the back of your neck rise several times.”
— Henry Wagner
“THE DAMAGE DONE starts like Stephen King’s CARRIE on crack and does not let up! Tremblay introduces us to a variety of characters, and it’s sinisterly satisfying to see them descend into their own type of madness. I was also touched by the author’s covert nods to his friends in the book. It’s full of gore and abuse that made me look away briefly, but never lose interest. I think it’s one of Tremblay’s best!”
— Mercedes M. Yardley
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