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Crescent Pines

A Modern Vampire Horror Novel

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Crescent Pines

By: Rafa Leyva
Narrated by: Jake Blomquist
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Summary

Some small towns keep their secrets. Crescent Pines buries them in blood.

Alex Castillo never planned to return to Crescent Pines. The remote Northern California town was little more than a ghost in his past—a place he left behind years ago. But when he decides to visit his aging aunt, Rosa, Alex can’t ignore the sense of urgency in the town's residents voices. They sound scared. Desperate. Like they know something he doesn’t.

From the moment he arrives, the town feels wrong. The streets are too quiet. The locals avoid his gaze. There’s a heaviness in the air, a stillness that makes his skin crawl. Something is lurking beneath the surface of Crescent Pines—something that moves in the dark, whispering just beyond the edge of Alex’s senses.

Then, people start to disappear. A missing hiker. A drifter no one remembers. A neighbor who simply vanishes overnight. The deeper Alex digs, the more he realizes the town is rotting from the inside out, its people trapped in fear, held in the grip of something far older—and far hungrier—than he ever imagined.

Crescent Pines isn’t just dying. It’s already dead.

Now, as night falls and the shadows stretch long, Alex discovers the horrifying truth: the town belongs to them. The things that lurk in the forests. The creatures that slip through locked doors and wait outside bedroom windows. The ones who whisper his name from the darkness.

He was called back for a reason. And if he doesn’t escape soon, he’ll never leave at all.

A gripping modern vampire horror novel perfect for fans of Salem’s Lot, 30 Days of Night, and Midnight Mass.

©2025 Rafa Leyva (P)2025 Rafa Leyva
Dark Fantasy Fantasy Horror Scary
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Alex returns to his hometown of Crescent Pines to visit his ailing Aunt Rosa, but while there he begins to sense an eerie presence and general feeling of unease, the cause of which will slowly unveil itself.
I found Crescent Pimes to be an enjoyable read overall. An ancient vampiric presence and a small community of susceptible townsfolk, what isn't there to love?
There are some areas of the novel that I think could be improved such as trying to create more tension and atmosphere in certain scenes.
I also think it would have been nice to have a little more development for the main characters as well as some higher stakes, (no pun intended), but still a fun read nonetheless!
I should point out that this is my first audiobook as I'm usually a physical book reader and this may have impacted how I felt about the book to a certain extent. It's going to take me a while to get used to not seeing the words in front of me.
For anyone who loves a small town horror and vampires you should definitely check out Crescent Pines!

Are you safe in your hometown?

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This is either someone's absolute first draft or a clear argument why AI shouldn't be writing novels.

We have whole chapters of exposition with no later relevance for the plot.

There are scenes where crucial things happened but it's mostly summarised with maybe a few lines of dialogue.

For a while this seems to become a forest survival manual, except with the protagonist having flashbacks to advice he was never given, mostly from a random shopkeeper but for one chapter from his father (who is never mentioned anywhere else).

Characters are named even though they appear briefly in crowd scenes or only once.

The protagonist is emotionally as flat as pancake.

There are constant 'whispers among the trees', 'shadows' and one these shadows are 'aggressive' somehow?), and every vampire moves in a 'predatory' way. It's always 'too' quiet/normal/dark/etc.

To make it worse, there's not even an ending to any of the central conflicts of the plot.

The book finishes with an epilogue that reads like a generated list, and even has a section called 'epilogue conclusion', as if this was a school essay. Most of the epilogue is from a different character's perspective, but for some reason he's personally motivated by the same family-based grievance as the main protagonist.

The chapter titles are exactly the type of lazy tropes you'd get from asking an AI for spooky stuff.

On the plus side, this absolute slop of a novel contains one amazing line - while hiding in the forest overnight, the protagonist is woken by 'the distant sound of squirrels'. Genius! Nonetheless, I can't imagine any human author would write that in seriousness.

I mean, perhaps this was spammed out by someone over a feverish weekend then they didn't edit it, and I think the reader is probably human (I pity the poor person who had the read this aloud with a straight face), but I can't in my heart believe this is not very largely, perhaps entirely, AI generated.

It's truly awful writing and the somewhat intriguing premise is absolutely not delivered.

The writing, plot, characters, and setting are exactly what you'd expect from AI generation - loose threads, inconsistent, no substance, occasional nonsense, and writing that drips with tropes that sometimes don't even make sense for the genre and plot. I could keep going, but I hope you've got the idea.

Don't get this. Don't support this. I listened only so I could write this review with confidence and warn others. Support human writers. Support human creativity. Don't even hate-listen. There are countless better things in the world.

Truly awful and probably AI

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