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Black River Orchard

A Novel

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Black River Orchard

Auteur(s): Chuck Wendig
Narrateur(s): Xe Sands, Brittany Pressley, Sean Patrick Hopkins, Cindy Kay, Kalani Queypo, Gabra Zackman, Victor Colomé
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À propos de cet audio

 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A small town is transformed when seven strange trees begin bearing magical apples in this masterpiece of horror from the author of Wanderers and The Book of Accidents.

“This masterful outing should continue to earn Wendig comparisons to Stephen King.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

LOCUS AWARD FINALIST • BRAM STOKER AWARD FINALIST • AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

It’s autumn in the town of Harrow, but something besides the season is changing there.

Because in that town there is an orchard, and in that orchard, seven most unusual trees. And from those trees grows a new sort of apple: strange, beautiful, with skin so red it’s nearly black.

Take a bite of one of these apples, and you will desire only to devour another. And another. You will become stronger. More vital. More yourself, you will believe. But then your appetite for the apples and their peculiar gifts will keep growing—and become darker.

This is what happens when the townsfolk discover the secret of the orchard. Soon it seems that everyone is consumed by an obsession with the magic of the apples . . . and what’s the harm, if it is making them all happier, more confident, more powerful?

Even if something else is buried in the orchard besides the seeds of these extraordinary trees: a bloody history whose roots reach back to the very origins of the town.

But now the leaves are falling. The days grow darker. It’s harvest time, and the town will soon reap what it has sown.©2023 Chuck Wendig (P)2023 Random House Audio Historique Psychologiques Surnaturels Thrillers et romans à suspense Paranormal Fiction Magique Effrayant

Ce que les critiques en disent

“Chuck Wendig is one of my very favorite storytellers. Black River Orchard is a deep, dark, luscious tale that creeps up on you and doesn’t let go.”—Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus

“An epic saga that is at once a propulsive horror novel and a parable, a thriller and a cautionary tale, Black River Orchard is the immensely talented Chuck Wendig at his finest.”—Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author of Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six

“A gripping story of love and legacies gone rotten, deeply rooted in the landscape and as twisty and gnarled as an ancient apple tree.”—T. Kingfisher, USA Today bestselling author of What Moves the Dead
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My only issue, and it might just be a me thing, is the male narrator spoke weirdly slow.

Great story - fun secrets!

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This was a very original horror novel. Who knew an apple orchard could be so creepy?  To me, what really drew me into the story was Xe Sands’s taut narration. Intimately, creepy and effective and utterly consuming. What dragged the performance down or put it in neutral, so to speak, was Kalani Queypo’s narration. He reads reads like a shy kid in grade 10 English class. Monotone, lacking in dynamic range and completely distracting from the story. I would’ve given five stars on performance, but this knocked a star off for me. Would recommend though. A great listen overall.

Xe Sands’s narration

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I didn’t know what to expect, but I thoroughly enjoyed the story! The voice actor for the ‘interludes’ I found very difficult to hear/understand.
It was a long listen but I thought it was well worth it. I am going to miss John Compass most of all.

Fun and spooky

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I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I will definitely read another by this author. I love the long reads when they don’t drag

Worth the read

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I love Chuck’s books. I enjoy how much he loves apples and how he channeled that into this book, and brought in the dark history. Great characters, great plot, great observations on current society.

Apple obsession turns to horror

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Ayant grandi près de vergers, je n’avais imaginé comment les pommes peuvent avoir un tel pouvoir sur nous !

Hors de l’ordinaire

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Interesting story, all the narrators except one were good (one lady was hard to hear with her breathy voice). The LGBT, trans rights, and sex stuff was distracting (not cutting edge as the author was probably going for). Who reads horror novels for the PC politics?!

Great except for...

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Dan Paxton lives with his daughter Calla in the small town of Harrow, and he's pretty sure he's going to have to tell his daughter that he can't pay for her college because his desperate attempt to graft the perfect apple ever has failed, that is until his 7 trees suddenly sprout apples; delicious, red, dripping apples. Soon after eating them the townspeople start to notice old injuries have faded, they've become stronger and faster, and better. Meanwhile there's a whole whack-load of other characters. Calla's annoying friends who feel like they stumbled out of <i>Bodies, Bodies, Bodies.</i> Joanie, who runs some kind of BDSM themed house rental. Meg and Emily, a married couple moving back to Meg's hometown after Emily cheated. John, an indigenous apple hunter who's former best friend died in Harrow while seeking an apple a few years back.

There are things I liked about this. A few at least. I liked the slow-build in which one of the characters turns out to be the villain, however I found them incredibly boring after their turn was complete, which seems contrary to the implication that the apple merely allowed the darkness within to be freed. In general the apple was inconsistent. Some characters when they go to eat it are so revolted by it that they spit it out. John calls this being rejected by the apple, which was how I interpreted it. But later it is revealed that everyone can tell the apple is evil and they just had the willpower to reject it. The problem is that we saw their point of view when they spat out the apple and it did not feel like that at all, but rather that they were, again, being rejected by it.

This was supposed to be stuff I liked.

I liked John. It was interesting to read about apple hunters. And it's nice to have both a quacker and someone uninterested in relationships or sex in a story. And his stoic nature made him so much less annoying than, well, everyone else. The others were infuriating.

The writing here ranges from passable to terrible, with a really bad habit of assuming the reader is an idiot and explaining things to them in great detail that were already perfectly implied. He utilizes a lot of conventions that feel to me like they mostly exist for the sake of visual story telling, like having John constantly visited by his deceased former friend when this is a book, you can just tell us John's thoughts. You don't have to invent a conceit to have him say them. The rest of the dialogue just screamed of "guy in his late forties tries to write women". I'm not even saying that he objectified them, but Emily, Joanie, and Calla all felt particularly inauthentic in a way that was really grating. They also all could be summed up with their identity which then continues to be all that's interesting about them and all they really talk about. Calla wants to be an social media influencer, Emily is a carefree lesbian, and Joanie likes BDSM and is in an open relationship. And now you know as much about them as I do after reading 600+ pages. This isn't "wokeness". It's bad writing.

All of these problems with the story would be diminished if the horror was good. It's not. I really struggled to figure out the tone, whether I was supposed to take any of this seriously. But the book deals with it's evil apples with a deathly seriousness. You can make ordinary things scary, but I never felt frightened or revolted by the apples. The rules seemed both too clear and unclear. The villains were supposed to have always been bad and also be victims in a way that didn't make fit for me. And then we got to the Orchard Tenders. To be clear Orchard Tender is a great monster name, but it's hard to make "apple seeds for teeth" sound scary no matter how many times you say it.

I think the evil apple needs to be more of a temptation thing, which this played with but never clearly. A lack of clear purpose is probably the main problem here.

One star may be unfair. A part of me feels that any book that manages to get me to finish 600 pages deserves at least 2, but throughout those 600 pages I mostly read on because I wanted to finish it, not because I was immersed or excited by it. Rather than terror, this mostly only annoyed me.

invasion of the apple pickers

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I am not a Chuck Wendig fan since I have found his writing to be so convoluted that it takes too long to get in to the actual action and then too long to get out of it. When I gave this writer another chance by purchasing Black River Orchard I was disappointed to discover that his long-winded writing has not improved with time. This book could have been sort of good had that not been the case. However, it took forever to get to the meat of the horror and then forever to get through it to the end. It is a very long listen that could have been, in my humble opinion, chopped by at least a third. The storyline is out there, kind of interesting, but ruined as it is full of holes that the author neither addresses nor fills. The characters are okay although I absolutely loathed Emily... a simpering, self-absorbed, stupid woman. Regarding performance, two of the narrators were good but the guy who read the John Compass scenes did just that... read them and pretty badly. So, all in all, although Black River Orchard had its moments, they are too few and far between for a recommendation.

A very long disappointment.

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I really enjoyed other books by this author, but this one left me annoyed to the point where I tried to return it (but wasn't allowed to for whatever reason). I was less than 2 hours in and got really bored with the left wing agenda that had nothing to do with the plot, being forced upon the listener.

I ignored it the first few times, but it got more frequent. I gave up about 5 hours into what could have been a good book. I will no longer be purchasing books by this author.

Be warned if you are a conservative person, this likely will not be a good listen for you.

Tried to return it. Left wing propaganda

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