The Haunting of Tyrese Walker

Product Information

I really enjoyed the mixture of local folklore and Jamaican mythology in this story and it made for a decent YA read.

The Haunting of Tyrese Walker is both skin-crawlingly creepy and beautiful. It magnificently and powerfully links supernatural activity & grief together, so much so I was mesmerised.

Age range(s)

Often writing for young adults focuses on a pivotal moment in the character’s life, when they’re having to be truly tested for the first time – whether that’s facing life-threatening supernatural danger, or finding the courage to ask someone out. Great YA fiction can explore the full range of emotions that its teen readers might be experiencing, and leaves space for them to decide how they feel about the characters and their choices.

Tyrese is consumed with grief from the loss of his father and is suffering physically and mentally. His mother decides to visit their family in Jamaica to give Tyrese a change in scenery in the hope it helps. Tyrese doesn’t want to be there as it's steeped with memories of his father who he refuses to talk about. He is happy to be close to his Grammy. Not long after his arrival strange and unsettling things start happening to and around him. Weird noises in the night, insects turning up under his covers, bizarre encounters with locals and scary sights in the mountains around his grandmother's home. Even more terrifying is the chant that an old man says to him about the Shadow Man and that he is out to get him. At first, he fobs this off as superstitious nonsense but when his Grammy takes it seriously and tries to talk to him about it, Tyrese realises that there is more to the story and he might be in danger. The years then went by, and my adoptive mum passed away, and the world as I knew it and how it once looked, was no more. I found grief truly brutal. All my wonderful memories now felt painful, and what the ‘tomorrows’ held seemed now a bleak prospect. My heart was broken, and life didn’t quite make sense, or seem to fit anymore, but as I had always done in not only times of joy, but of times of difficulty, I found solace in writing. It was a place of safety, a place where I had some semblance of control. I started to write poetry which is where my writing grew from since I was a child, and then the question of, ‘what if’, started to form and grow in my head… What if there was a young teenage boy living through this sort of pain? And what if everything he ever had known and had taken for granted, and had loved, overnight was ripped away from him? What would the world look like to him? What would he look like to himself? And as these questions formed more and more, so did Tyrese Walker.

Rose said: “Having been adopted, natural curiosity as a teenager led me to discover more about my birth family: my paternal heritage being a wonderful diversity of Jamaican and Nigerian. And it was while visiting family for the first time, I initially heard about duppies. Even all those years ago, they sparked my imagination, and I immediately knew this captivating part of Jamaican folklore was something I one day wanted to write about. To have had the opportunity to celebrate a part of my heritage by writing this contemporary horror story with diversity and inclusion at its heart has been amazing. From the moment they arrived at Grammy's, strange things start to happen, beginning when Tyrese starts to see and hear things. Tyrese is not very receptive when he arrives at Grammy's house and is a bit rude to Grammy and his cousin. Later that first night, Tyrese goes outside to talk to Grammy who is spreading rice on the ground outside her home. Grammy explains it is to keep the evil spirits away but Tyrese thinks his Grammy's superstitions are just that . So, when she asks him to finish circling the house with the rice, he gets scared and brushes it off, leaving the house exposed because he didn't finish the job. That night more strange things begin to happen.... Tyrese har precis förlorat sin pappa och vägrar möta sorgen på det sätt som hans mamma och hans psykolog råder honom. Istället går han in i sig själv, låser in sig på rummet i Manchester och vägrar ta ut itu med mörkret som han bär på.

Yes, I'm writing one now and really enjoying it. It will be another psychological horror, it will be a slightly older YA and this time with vampires. I own horses and so if I'm not at my desk, you'll find me with my dog playing with and riding my horses. Where and when do you do your best writing? What do you do when you lose motivation with your writing?As Tyrese Feels He Is Losing His Grip On Reality As He Learns It Is The Shadow Man Who Is After Him. Can Tyrese, His Cousin & New Found Friend Solve This Mystery Or Will Tyrese Succumb To The Darkness & Madness? 😱

Tyrese. Of course, I loved the main character. He was perfectly written. And a great representation of being lost to the darkness of one’s grief. My heart truly ached for him. We follow Tyrese, Marvin and Ellie as they try to save themselves from the duppies and daemons of Jamacia. What does the shadow man want with Tyrese? They dig up stories of grief from the past as they try to figure out who the shadow man is and how they can stop him, We also follow Tyrese on his journey of grief and you see his character go through all the stages of denial, anger and finally acceptance – it was beautiful to read.

The treatment of mental health and bottling up your feelings is perfect for a supernatural story, it’s a clever way to show that by sharing with those around you it can make you feel less isolated and help you move on with your life. I was kindly sent a copy of this book from Anderson Press for taking part in a blog tour organised by Kalediscopic Tours, with thanks to both! This has not impacted my review. The setting for any book, the world building, is very important as I'm taking the reader on a journey and I need them to see it and smell it and hear it as if they were there themselves, so I combine places I know as well as looking at photographs and art and memory recall and emotional recall to create the setting.