Shadow Flicker by Gregory Bastianelli takes on the very real phenomenon of shadow flicker in a very spooky way. Oscar Basaran is an insurance investigator who is sent to Kidney Island off the coast of Maine to investigate claims that wind turbines are having an adverse impact of the health of nearby residents. As Oscar interviews the complainants, he hears some pretty bizarre stories about what the residents think is happening as a result of the shadow flicker and noise that comes from the wind turbines. Could the wind turbines which provide clean renewable energy to the island cause the events that he’s hearing or have the residents simply gone mad?
Wow! I read this book almost in one sitting (darn having to go to work) and was captivated right from the first sentence. I will not spoil anything, but this book was so much fun! It is a combination of supernatural, science fiction, horror, mystery, etc. This is my first book I’ve read by the author, but it will definitely not be my last.

Perhaps not as much of a horror as a chilling science fiction, Shadow Flicker sets up an isolated community, an unsettling exaggeration of the flickering shadow from wind turbines, and a mystery to solve for an insurance investigator.

I’ve seen a few reviews saying they lost it 3/4 of the way through when it all kicks off. They must have been reading a different book to me, as it feels a natural progression from what has come before - the clues were there and then you have a big reveal. V well handled I felt.

Nice approach to foregrounding an LGBT character without making the storyline about being gay too. Still feels unusual enough to be remarked upon.

In horror fiction, there is always something creepy about small, isolated communities and if that small community is on an island off the main coast, we can safely double the creep factor.
Kidney island with its looming wind turbines, mad cows, disappearing children and suspicious locals lives up to this expectation. Oscar Basaran is the outsider ( and not just geographically) tasked with documenting the effects of the wind turbines on the island folk.
Oscar is a sympathetic character and his unease is realistically described by the author and yet you can understand why he chooses to stay when his back story is revealed.
The secondary characters are an eclectic mix of normal trying to cope in an awful environment to the outright strange and unwelcoming but the wind turbines themselves are just as much as a character as the islanders- looming and humming in the background and ever-present.
The tension slowly builds up through the book’s explosive climax which I won’t go into as this would completely spoil the story. But I have to say I was not expecting that explanation on why the shadow flicker was causing so much harm.
I really enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend this to anyone who loves their mystery with a touch of science-fiction.

This review will go live at the first link below on 21 March:

Hi and welcome to my review of Shadow Flicker!

Before reading Shadow Flicker, I didn’t know the term “shadow flicker” although I was of course familiar with the phenomenon itself: shadow flicker is the effect of the sun shining through the rotating blades of a wind turbine, casting a moving shadow. Every time I drive or cycle past windmills I say that it would drive me bonkers if I had to live with that, so naturally, a book in which this phenomenon is escalated really intrigued me.

However, not only the premise is intriguing, the whole book is. Shadow Flicker is a slow-burner for the most part, but it is so intriguing and mysterious throughout, I just couldn’t stop reading.

A wind park has been erected on an island off the coast of Maine and some of the residents have filed a complaint. The story is told from the perspective of the independent investigator of said complaint and is set entirely on this small island with its sparse population, so Shadow Flicker definitely has a kind of locked room trope going on, which I always enjoy and which really helped build the atmosphere and the mystery.

The island is rocking a bit of a Twin Peaks vibe and I really didn’t know what to believe, nor what to expect. Most of the people are acting weird, and some of the animals are as well, and what is up with the kid who went missing a year ago but has been seen in the shadow flicker?

The last 30% or so clashes a little with what came before, when we finally find out what’s what with things coming to a head. Here is where the speculative bit of the story really comes into its own and I have a sneaky suspicion not everyone will love it, but I really enjoyed it.

Shadow Flicker is a hugely entertaining speculative mystery that will have me looking warily at windmills for a long time to come.

Massive thanks to Flame Tree Press and NetGalley for the eARC. All opinions are my own.

This review is for an ARC copy received from the publisher through NetGalley.

This was an interesting ride with many ups and downs. I really enjoyed the first half of this book, although it was a bit slow you could feel it building up to something. I really enjoyed the characters, the neighbors that sold their land to the company who put up the wind turbines. They were so fleshed out had so many things going on in each of their lives. I really felt for them. I was very sad to see what happened to some of these characters after building up a fondness for them.

I also felt the uncomfortable presence of the wind turbines. I couldn't stand dealing with a flickering light, let alone all the other odd things occurring. These people were stranded with no way to get out and they just had to put up with it and I can relate to that.

Our main character, Oscar, oh poor Oscar. He was a man thrust into an impossible situation. He had every right to think that everyone had lost their minds.

About halfway through I started to lose interest, but I pushed through. At around 75%, everything went wild. It went so far off the track I thought we were on and so much happened and so much was revealed in such a short piece of the book that it left me feeling like a shook-up soda bottle. When it ended, I was just very taken aback, like, what just happened?

Now I think I could have walked away from this book okay with how it ended. I could have accepted the wild turn of events. I would have felt a bit unsatisfied but still overall thought it was alright. It would have been even better if it would have happened at the halfway point so we could get more detail and more time spent about this dramatic shift in the story.

That being said. There was one huge thing that I cannot get past, and I am so bothered by it. The treatment of women in this book is not okay. I rarely get offended, but I am offended. I am flabbergasted that our gay main character would meet a woman for the first time and just judge her appearance so harshly. She could have been attractive if it weren't for yadda yadda yadda. Women are more than just skin suits walking around to appease other eyes. He didn't judge men in the same way, he didn't look to see how attractive they were. He didn't acknowledge their looks at all really. He found one man attractive but everyone else got to walk around looking how they looked without being rudely judged. That is the only way I can think to put it.

I had a hard time getting past that and when I thought I had gotten past it we had the plot shift occur. Now I know things were different and it was a different type of area. It still did not feel okay how the women were treated. I can't go into detail without giving stuff away and I am trying to put this delicately but pinching nipples as endearment and studded collars, not okay. If the 'horror' of the book was women being mistreated, then something like this would have fit. If it were a fleshed-out fantasy novel and this was just the way of things, I could probably look past it. I am okay with wild things happening in horror books if they fit. This felt really out of place and not okay.

Overall it was an interesting read. It wasn't what I expected but the idea was cool.

Unlike Bastianelli's previous novel Snowball, Shadow Flicker is much slower to get going. The strange occurrences are almost lost amongst descriptions of the Kidney Island residents menial daily activities.
At chapter twenty I paused to ponder how much action or character development had truly grabbed my attention- unfortunately not a great deal. However, I was curious at the potentially sinister disappearance of the previous investigator. I read on.

Whilst insurance investigator Oscar is the lead of the novel, we also read from the perspectives of several island residents. I had no trouble distinguishing one from another, despite multiple view points in quick succession, but it did make the characters harder to invest in.

I stuck with Shadow Flicker right to the end hoping it would pick up. Well it did. At the 75% mark where the entire plot turned on its head and everything just went batshit crazy.

I didnt enjoy this book. Not one bit.

So, I’ve enjoyed the author before and was eager to give this one a read. And it is a trip.

I was definitely a little confused at first, but I was also really invested in our main character and wanted to know what was going on. Once I figured it out (or so I thought), this was a fast race to a very satisfying and surprising end!

Horror fans should be pleased with the reason behind everything and the book is eerie enough to keep you reading.

I really liked tha the author managed to surprise me here and I’m looking forward to his next offering!

*ARC via Publisher

Wow! I mean, really, WOW!

This novel was engrossing and it wasn't at all what I thought it was going to be--not in a bad way.

An island with a small community is taken over be wind turbines and the symptoms that come with them--a constant hum and shadow flicker. I won't give anything away, but I was sucked into this story. I couldn't put it down. The writing was fabulous and the characters drove this eerie, chilling tale of the unexpected and very exciting. I loved the small-town vibe and the main character was loveable, intelligent, and a wonderful guide through this enthralling tale.

Sci-fi mystery where an insurance agent comes to a small island to investigate claims against a wind turbine company. As he hears tales of the bizarre, strange events seem to surround those living nearest to the turbines, including himself. An ex-school teacher has a very strange theory of what’s happening. And people are going missing. Is everyone mad or are the turbines making them go insane?

Sadly I just couldn’t get into this book. I think the concept wasn’t grabbing me as much as I thought it would when I first initially requested it. I didn’t really find it easy to get into the characters m, hence was unable to make a connection that would keep me reading with any real vigour. Perhaps it just wasn’t a good match. Thanks to Netgalley for the arc.

Oscar works for an insurance agency. His current task is to interview people on Kidney Island that are complaining about troubles with wind turbines that were installed near their homes. Issues range from people and animals suddenly acting strange, to disappearances, and strange incidents involving death. At times, it seems that there is something strange going on, at other times it is like things are all in peoples heads.

At times I found this to be a little long. I felt like the pace dragged at that point. The other times I remained interested. I feel like there was a lack of descriptions. To the point that it was like listening to someone talk about something that just happened to them.

Look around you right now. Suppose what you see now actually exists, right now, on another plane. The same place, just slightly different. The a different society, different dress, buildings are similar, but different. Many people believe that alternate planes exist in the same place. You swear you saw a ghost, but what if it was just a person who somehow wandered through an opening from their plane into yours, the "opening of the mouth".
Maybe you hear a voice and call "who's there?" In the same room, on another plane someone hears the words "Who's there?", they look around and see nothing.. Unknown to you, you're standing next to each other on alternate planes.

When Oscar goes to investigate complaints from the residents of Kidney Island about the ill effects caused by wind turbines he's met with strange, impossible to prove tales that are just plain crazy. Time stopping, a suicidal horse and cow, missing people....then Oscar starts seeing some strange things himself and finds himself in one predicament after another where safety seems to be a cruel illusion that can never be real again. #shadowFlicker #netgalley

Shadow Flicker is a wonderfully, imaginative novel. This book would be especially interested to anyone interested in the theory of alternate realities and different planes of existence.

I had never heard of the "shadow flicker" effect from wind turbines before I found this book. The idea of that effect having severe ramifications on the people and animals near where they're located made for an intriguing horror premise. Unfortunately, while I found the writing to be decent, I just really couldn't get into the story as a whole. There were too many times that it felt like what might have been a successful novella was padded to stretch it into a full-length novel. Based on the Goodreads rating system, I consider it an "OK" book.

I’ve read and enjoyed Snowball by the author before, so this was a pretty easy selection. And, mostly, a worthy one.
A conceptually terrifying tale of the high costs of renewable energy. Or something to that extent.
As if Maine wasn’t made creepy enough by genre literature to begin with, now there’s this…on a small island off the cost of it something strange is going on with their newly erected wind turbines. And effect they call a shadow flicker. It isn’t inexplicable, it has to do with the sun reflecting off the turbine and creating a high potency sort of flicker. It drives the island denizens nearest to it to distraction. But they are not the only ones. And the madness this flicker seems to induce varies from individual to individual. Some get sad, some get mad, some get dangerous. Some get litigious.
Enter an insurance investigator from the mainland, a fish out of water in every way, from his brown skin to his sexual orientation, the author really ramped up his protagonist’s otherness here. The man’s job is simple – talk to the locals, gather the information pertinent to the potential lawsuit, get out.
It seemed like a good idea, a good assignment for the time being, a nice getaway from an abruptly and brutally dissolved relationship. Until it wasn’t. Until the assignment proved to be more complicated then possibly imagined. Some might even say otherworldly.
So, conceptually this certainly lives up to its promise. It’s a fun, exciting and original tale. Kudos there. Writing wise is where it gets tricky. Mind you, Bastinaelli is, in theory, a pretty good writer, he understands the importance of character development, pacing, basic story dynamics and all that well. So, the sum total ends up like a perfectly readable and coherent story. But the individual sentences - the metaphorical trees of this forest - leave a lot to be desired.
Now, a fair disclaimer, I read a Netgalley ARC of this book, it is entirely possible that the book hadn’t made it to the final round of edits before offered (although this particular publisher is usually good about that), but the version of the book I read had strikingly clunky sentences all over it. From compound ones to ones that started with a but, not one but two in a row back-to-back, from just weird stiltedness and frequent repetitiveness…this book screamed for editor’s attention. The weird thing is that it still worked overall as a novel, it just jarred you now and again with the incongruity of quality of the individual elements when compared to project at large. Kind of like a person with individually unattractive features that still presents like a decent looking individual.
And, since my reviews are meant to reflect personal reading experience first and foremost (with overall semi-objective opinion of the book as second), it must be rated accordingly, which is to say good story with writing that, at times (not always), left a lot to be desired. Nevertheless, fun was had and Bastianelli continues to be an author worth watching and this book is worth reading if only for the really exciting idea behind it. Gotta love reading a book uncertain of where it’s going, all the surprises that comes with. Thanks Netgalley.

I never heard the term "shadow flicker" until the title of this engrossing, suspenseful, novel. In fact, I knew very little about wind turbines or wind farms, except that this is purported to be a new reliable source of renewable energy.


In SHADOW FLICKER, a totally absorbing story, a small Maine island is the site of a small wind farm of only three turbines, yet enough to provide sufficient energy for Kidney Island plus surplus for sale. However the three farm families on Haven Road have suffered a continuum from headaches and sleep deprivation through dementia, loss of intimacy, divorce, to loss of livestock and life. A scientist in the employ of the Turbine provider disappears; then an insurance claims adjuster is tasked with interviewing the resident claimants suing the provider.


Throughout the novel, the reader is pondering whether madness or ghosts or hypnosis or governmental conspiracies [I was reminded of the CIA's Project MK-ULTRA] or some bizarre Cosmic paranormal element is operating here