The Breach by M. T. Hill

THE BREACH has everything going for it, a great premise, scary action tinged with an overlay of creeping terror, and a promise of a shock or two along the way. That said, however, this one fell short, for me at least, on one major count: characterisation. And anyone who knows me, and reads my reviews regularly will know, it put a great deal of emphasis on characters and their arcs. I want to see them grow, I want to see depth, I want to believe in these people and, therefore, how they’re challenged by the situations they find themselves in.

Sadly, The Breach never quite delivered on any of those counts when it comes to the two main protagonists. Whose shoulders, quite frankly, the weight of this story, and its premise, fall upon. They never really hit the right notes, especially Freya Medlock (the Journalist) who had about as much depth as the paper she was printed on. A generic female with little if any personality.

The other main character, a steeplejack by trade, Shep (short for Shepard) does at least have a little more going for him, but not much. I wanted so much more from these two, that the author just failed to deliver on. For instance, Shep is in an exceptionally dangerous line of work, he literally hangs off the side of soaring brick towers, and petrochemical factory structures hundreds of feet up in the air, in all weather.

Yet, all these scenes setting up who he is and what he does, and these amazing set pieces of daring, all fall flat. We never really get a feel for the danger he’s in. When we should be feeling his vertigo, and keen sense of awareness, we’re given a guidebook tour of the view or his wandering thoughts. And thus, the prose lack any real edge to it.

Which belies how creepy and downright horrific everything becomes—accompanied by a foreboding sense of terror—when Shep (and then later, Shep and Freya) are beneath ground during one of Shep’s ‘Urbex’ missions into a restricted abandoned site hidding a frightening secret.

It’s here, in these two chapters, that we really see everything ‘light’ up and come to life in a way only a nightmare can—in a dark, damp, creepy fashion. Making us wonder what’s behind us, stalking us from the deep dark depths of our own imaginations.

Here is Hill’s writing strength—which are too few and far between the humdrum set of the rest of the novel—that make this a terrifying read. And, as such, The Breach could have been an outstanding horror read but, in the end for me at least, it just never quite reached the finish line.

Way too much filler and not enough action.