A chilling supernatural tale with indelible characters.
In this third installment of a thriller series, an orthopedic surgery resident inherits a haunted hotel with potentially lethal family secrets.
Dr. Benjamin Oris is now the proud owner of The Abigael Inn, courtesy of a great aunt he didn’t know he had. He immediately thinks of selling it, as the Massachusetts hotel is five hours away from the Philadelphia hospital where he works. But rather than speak to a realtor, he decides to inspect the inn, currently closed for the winter. Before Ben leaves, his comatose mother, who transmits sometimes-cryptic telepathic thoughts, tells her son: “I need you to finish it.” Everything seems OK in Massachusetts; a capable head housekeeper runs the hotel, and Ben reunites with his maternal grandparents, whom he’s seen only once. But rumors of a haunted Abigael Inn swirl, and unexplained sights and noises unsettle Ben, all alone at the vacant hotel. His fear only mounts when his girlfriend, Laurette, joins him, as they determine ghosts abound, including a particularly nasty one. They dig deeper into the inn’s history as well as Ben’s mysterious family on his mother’s side and turn up someone’s horrifying plot involving murder and a paranormal ceremony. Rubin offers readers an effective change of pace in this installment. While the previous volumes were medical thrillers with supernatural touches, this novel spotlights the paranormal. Early scenes at the haunted hotel showcase genre conventions, from a ghostly conversation via a Ouija board to a scribbled message on a steamy mirror. But the story slowly amps up frights as an evil presence emerges and threatens multiple people. As in the preceding books, the supporting cast nearly outshines the protagonist. For example, Sophia Diaz (who has a son with Ben) and Laurette, both series staples, prove vital in fighting sinister forces. The author’s pithy writing keeps the story popping all the way to the rousing final act.
A chilling supernatural tale with indelible characters.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 293
Publisher: Indigo Dot Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smart and smart-alecky tale of technology put to bad ends by bad people..
Horror writer Tremblay shifts gears for a provocative exercise in postmodern SF.
Julia Flang is a young San Fernando Valley slacker unmotivated enough to do the Dude proud, and indeed The Big Lebowski is her favorite movie. It’s another old movie, though, that gives her the code name for the lucrative task her Big Tech mogul of an estranged mother assigns her: Weekend at Bernie’s. Julia’s Bernie is an employee who’s fallen into a coma and, now “mostly dead,” has been fitted with “proprietary technology” that can get him to a lab on the other side of the country; Julia, a pro-level video gamer, has just the joystick chops to steer him, zombielike, via remote control, through airports and down city streets. A shroud of secrecy and paranoia surrounds Bernie, and for good reason: A journalist who waylays Julia raises the prospect that while Bernie—who has a real name, as Julia learns—may prove an interesting case study in the workings of consciousness, it’s also entirely possible that the corporation has more nefarious designs (“Is it a huge leap,” our journalist asks, “to think weapons contractors wouldn’t be dreaming about remote-control soldiers?”). Though Julia is given to falling back on bits of Coen brothers dialogue—“Lotta strands to keep in old Duder’s head”—in times of stress, she’s not without inner resources. Neither, it turns out, is Bernie, who, while not exactly having a mind of his own, “a robot wearing the permeable armor of failing human flesh,” certainly proves a package that’s hard to handle. It all makes for an entertaining shaggy dog, or maybe shaggy sheep, tale, though it won’t come as a surprise that Tremblay ends it all on a nicely gory note.
A smart and smart-alecky tale of technology put to bad ends by bad people..Pub Date: June 30, 2026
ISBN: 9780063398467
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.
The master of supernatural disaster returns with four horror-laced novellas.
The protagonist of the title story, Holly Gibney, is by King’s own admission one of his most beloved characters, a “quirky walk-on” who quickly found herself at the center of some very unpleasant goings-on in End of Watch, Mr. Mercedes, and The Outsider. The insect-licious proceedings of the last are revisited, most yuckily, while some of King’s favorite conceits turn up: What happens if the dead are never really dead but instead show up generation after generation, occupying different bodies but most certainly exercising their same old mean-spirited voodoo? It won’t please TV journalists to know that the shape-shifting bad guys in that title story just happen to be on-the-ground reporters who turn up at very ugly disasters—and even cause them, albeit many decades apart. Think Jack Torrance in that photo at the end of The Shining, and you’ve got the general idea. “Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same,” King writes, “and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard.” In the careful-what-you-wish-for department, Rat is one of those meta-referential things King enjoys: There are the usual hallucinatory doings, a destiny-altering rodent, and of course a writer protagonist who makes a deal with the devil for success that he thinks will outsmart the fates. No such luck, of course. Perhaps the most troubling story is the first, which may cause iPhone owners to rethink their purchases. King has gone a far piece from the killer clowns and vampires of old, with his monsters and monstrosities taking on far more quotidian forms—which makes them all the scarier.
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.Pub Date: April 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3797-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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