An exceptional story that derives its frights from both supernatural and corporeal aspects.
A deputy’s personal investigation into a reputedly haunted building in Louisiana links a string of unexplained and seemingly unrelated deaths in this suspense sequel.
The most terrifying experience in Landry Drake’s life was when, dared by his older brother, he spent an hour in the Asylum. The 200-year-old structure, residing in the ghost town of Victory, Louisiana, is known as the state’s “most haunted building.” Beginning as a hotel in the 1800s, the edifice became a maximum security prison at the turn of the century and housed violent, mentally unstable inmates. The locals dubbed it the Asylum, which was eventually shut down due to widespread abuse of prisoners by vicious guards. Since then, rumors have claimed that the dead inmates haunt the place. Twelve years after his ordeal, 20-something Landry, now an Iberia Parish deputy sheriff, is still disturbed by the voices he’s certain he heard back then. He researches the Asylum and learns 13 unsolved murders have occurred there in the last three decades. Landry later teams up with Cate Adams, daughter of the building’s current owner, and soon uncovers a connection among the killings as well as other puzzling local deaths. He struggles to unravel the mystery despite the sheriff’s orders to stop spending his night shifts on amateur sleuthing. Meanwhile, two brutal thugs and longtime prison escapees Mack Thorn and Sam Gold are regular squatters at the Asylum. Their lives ultimately intersect with Landry’s and Cate’s, precipitating a savage encounter in a building that’s very likely already inhabited by ghosts. Notwithstanding its haunted-house scenario, Thompson’s (Callie, 2017, etc.) novel is more mystery than horror. Supernatural elements, for one, are ambiguous: The voices Landry (and others) has heard in the Asylum could easily belong to humans who are very much alive. Moreover, the introduction of Mack and Sam not only provides the story with an unmistakable menace, but also hints at the possibility that the two men are the haunters. The author sets an unnerving tone with straightforward but engrossing writing. The history of the Asylum, for example, is an extended segment that never loiters thanks to meticulous and harrowing details of the guards’ mistreatment of inmates. Similarly, the story’s atmosphere is often ominous, even when outside Asylum walls: “Dense, low-hanging storm clouds rolled in fast. Summer storms popped up in the humid evenings, and a rumble of thunder gave a preview of what to expect.” Landry and Cate’s immediate attraction doesn’t spark much romance but does pair the protagonist with a much-needed ally. Yet it’s the eccentric supporting characters who truly add depth to the narrative. Standouts include Cate’s father, whose purchase of cheap, unwanted properties has netted him 200 parcels in Louisiana, and a spooky, immoral preacher who has no qualms about trespassing. Much of the final act unfolds inside the Asylum, clarifying the mysteries while putting both Landry and Cate in peril. There are also a couple of surprises that are quite effective. These are trailed by an explanation and wrap-up that’s largely unnecessary (Thompson’s plot is coherent throughout) but fortunately not prolonged.
An exceptional story that derives its frights from both supernatural and corporeal aspects.Pub Date: June 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9979129-8-2
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Asendente Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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SEEN & HEARD
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