Trent, Rita and their son Milo arrive at their new home located in their new suspiciously unfinished subdivision and while getting settled, it isn’t long before they uncover shoddy workmanship throughout their property.  Driven to fix it himself, Trent tackles the work head on.  However, as the work becomes increasingly complicated, it takes a toll on Trent’s psyche.  And what’s going on with their son Milo and his troubling obsession with a specific YouTube channel?  Is Rita hiding something from her husband and son that threatens to destroy their family?

I rarely inject profanity into my reviews, but Nick Cutter and Andrew F. Sullivan’s THE HANDYMAN METHOD is one seriously fucked up book.  Given that I’ve read nearly everything Craig Davidson has released under his Nick Cutter pseudonym, you would think I’d be used to a certain level of horror and depravity, but I was wrong.  THE HANDYMAN METHOD goes to places I did not expect and brought to the surface a twisted type of dread that left me reeling.

In using seemingly “haunted” YouTube videos as the main driver of the novel’s terror, they add a level of uneasiness that propelled the novel to a new level of creepiness. The way the videos and those in them warped the minds of the characters in the book felt completely original and something I honestly can’t remember reading in another story.  At least not in recent memory.

There are not many books that leave me feeling truly unsettled and uncomfortable, but this is absolutely one of them.  There are a few moments where I felt like events went a little too far, but that’s the whole point of the horror genre and why it has so many fans, writers and admirers.  Cutter is known for pushing his readers to their absolute limits, so be forewarned that this story navigates into some pretty dark territory.

THE HANDYMAN METHOD is scheduled for release on August 8th, 2023.

Fair Warning:  This book contains one of the more insane depictions of animal death I’ve experienced in quite some time.  For those familiar with what Cutter presented in his novel The Troop, this may not be a surprise.  However, this one scene in particular went on for so long reaching a point where I felt sick and needed to put the book down and walk away.  Honestly, that may be a selling point for some people, but I thought it was worth letting people know what they’re getting into with this one.