Nimbly tackles dual genres in a tale that will appeal to fans of any age.
Realizing her recurrent visions are just one of her supernatural abilities, a teen falls in love with a ghost and finds herself the target of a sinister presence in Kerr’s (Magnetic, 2015, etc.) paranormal romance.
When a neighbor reports that 17-year-old Jane Anderson is often home alone, social services puts the Texan girl on a train to live with distant relatives in Hartford, Connecticut. Escaping an abusive, neglectful mother, Jane is initially wary of Dean and Joanna Rochester. But as she grows to trust her surrogate family, she’s disturbed by the fixer-upper that will soon be the Rochesters’ new home, which she had already seen in her dreams. The teenager’s frequent visions and lucid dreams have likewise predated her running into handsome blond Will in the nearby woods. The same-aged boy, as well as younger Nadine, Ethan, and Emmett, stayed at the house back when it was an orphanage—during the Great Depression. They’re benevolent ghosts with whom Jane, unlike other humans, can make physical contact. That’s good news for Jane and Will, who quickly fall in love and surrender to mutual lust. Unfortunately, there’s another persistent spirit, homicidal rapist Frank Sullivan, who, along with wife Pearl, tortured and murdered the children. Frank possesses humans to assault Jane, until he realizes he need not “borrow a body” to get his grubby hands on her. The novel is an impressive blend of romance and tension. Jane bounces back and forth between affection for Will and anxiety over her inevitable confrontation with Frank. Jane confides in Dean, her honorary stepfather, who suggests Jane hone her gifts. Despite Frank’s reprehensible deeds, Kerr avoids lingering on violence, and though Jane and Will can touch, sex scenes concentrate on emotional “fireworks” and “breathless bliss” over bodies intermingling. Hints of secrets in Jane’s lineage and her untapped potential set the groundwork for another book.
Nimbly tackles dual genres in a tale that will appeal to fans of any age.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5061-5167-0
Page Count: 378
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Not his best, but a spooky pleasure for King’s boundless legion of fans.
Horrormeister King (End of Watch, 2016, etc.) serves up a juicy tale that plays at the forefront of our current phobias, setting a police procedural among the creepiest depths of the supernatural.
If you’re a little squeamish about worms, you’re really not going to like them after accompanying King through his latest bit of mayhem. Early on, Ralph Anderson, a detective in the leafy Midwestern burg of Flint City, is forced to take on the unpleasant task of busting Terry Maitland, a popular teacher and Little League coach and solid citizen, after evidence links him to the most unpleasant violation and then murder of a young boy: “His throat was just gone,” says the man who found the body. “Nothing there but a red hole. His bluejeans and underpants were pulled down to his ankles, and I saw something….” Maitland protests his innocence, even as DNA points the way toward an open-and-shut case, all the way up to the point where he leaves the stage—and it doesn’t help Anderson’s world-weariness when the evil doesn’t stop once Terry’s in the ground. Natch, there’s a malevolent presence abroad, one that, after taking a few hundred pages to ferret out, will remind readers of King’s early novel It. Snakes, guns, metempsychosis, gangbangers, possessed cops, side tours to jerkwater Texas towns, all figure in King’s concoction, a bloodily Dantean denunciation of pedophilia. King skillfully works in references to current events (Black Lives Matter) and long-standing memes (getting plowed into by a runaway car), and he’s at his best, as always, when he’s painting a portrait worthy of Brueghel of the ordinary gone awry: “June Gibson happened to be the woman who had made the lasagna Arlene Peterson dumped over her head before suffering her heart attack.” Indeed, but overturned lasagna pales in messiness compared to when the evil entity’s head caves in “as if it had been made of papier-mâché rather than bone.” And then there are those worms. Yuck.
Not his best, but a spooky pleasure for King’s boundless legion of fans.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8098-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.
Things are about to get bloody for a group of Charleston housewives.
In 1988, the scariest thing in former nurse Patricia Campbell’s life is showing up to book club, since she hasn’t read the book. It’s hard to get any reading done between raising two kids, Blue and Korey, picking up after her husband, Carter, a psychiatrist, and taking care of her live-in mother-in-law, Miss Mary, who seems to have dementia. It doesn’t help that the books chosen by the Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant are just plain boring. But when fellow book-club member Kitty gives Patricia a gloriously trashy true-crime novel, Patricia is instantly hooked, and soon she’s attending a very different kind of book club with Kitty and her friends Grace, Slick, and Maryellen. She has a full plate at home, but Patricia values her new friendships and still longs for a bit of excitement. When James Harris moves in down the street, the women are intrigued. Who is this handsome night owl, and why does Miss Mary insist that she knows him? A series of horrific events stretches Patricia’s nerves and her Southern civility to the breaking point. (A skin-crawling scene involving a horde of rats is a standout.) She just knows James is up to no good, but getting anyone to believe her is a Sisyphean feat. After all, she’s just a housewife. Hendrix juxtaposes the hypnotic mundanity of suburbia (which has a few dark underpinnings of its own) against an insidious evil that has taken root in Patricia’s insular neighborhood. It’s gratifying to see her grow from someone who apologizes for apologizing to a fiercely brave woman determined to do the right thing—hopefully with the help of her friends. Hendrix (We Sold Our Souls, 2018, etc.) cleverly sprinkles in nods to well-established vampire lore, and the fact that he’s a master at conjuring heady 1990s nostalgia is just the icing on what is his best book yet.
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68369-143-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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