A deliciously deft horror page-turner.
In Cash’s (Collision, 2014) horror novel, a young couple confronts malicious spirits while renovating a Victorian mansion.
Real estate investors Brad and Julie have flipped a series of homes, with each property netting them enough cash to buy and renovate the next. He loves losing himself in the physical labor, while she handles the paperwork. But their latest purchase, the Bedlam House on Long Island, feels different. As Brad sorts through the mounds of trash in the dilapidated basement, he starts to resent his wife; Julie had insisted they buy the mansion, as she was drawn to its sales potential. The harder Brad works, however, the stranger Bedlam House becomes. One day, he hears an odd rumbling, and when he breaks through a plaster wall, he finds a subbasement filled with crates containing a huge trove of “the stuff of everyday life dating back to who knew when.” Unbeknownst to Brad, two ghosts, Tessa and Gerald, are watching him. Tessa intends to seduce the young husband—something he might not survive. However, Gerald warns her that threatening his life will cause the mysterious creatures known as Sentinels to interfere, which neither ghost wants. This is familiar genre territory, but Cash’s breezy prose and sharply drawn characters shine. For example, he quickly portrays Tessa as a spoiled princess when she tells Gerald, “If [Brad] throws away my fox stole, you are going to have to kill him.” The author executes haunting scenes with a perfect balance of style and substance: “Nails caressed the back of his neck, and he whipped around, rattled, his eyes wild.” The narrative’s pacing and tone, though, are perhaps its most enjoyable aspects. Cash lets readers’ expectations simmer throughout, and he encourages them to cheer for both the ghouls and the greedy couple—and to look forward to whatever horrific climax awaits them. That said, the tidy ending is the only place where Cash’s control works against him; readers will likely crave a much livelier mess.
A deliciously deft horror page-turner.Pub Date: May 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497345515
Page Count: 392
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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
A touching fable with a couple of deft political jabs on the way to showing that it might just be possible for us all to get...
King (The Outsider, 2018, etc.) revisits a couple of familiar themes while paying heed to new realities in this elegant whisper of a story.
Scott Carey has a problem. He’s a big guy, clocking in north of 240 pounds, but lately the bathroom scale has been telling him something different: He looks the same, but he’s losing weight, pound after pound. “Twenty-eight pounds,” he tells a doctor friend. “So far.” There’s more weight loss to come, recalling horrormeister King’s Thinner (as Richard Bachman), though without the curse. But what is it that’s remaking Scott—diabetes, cancer, a change of metabolism? It’s not for want of eating: As King writes, “One of the benefits of his peculiar condition, aside from all the extra energy, was how he could eat as much as he wanted without turning into a podge.” An adventurous palate, curiosity, and a brace of pooping pups who leave bits of themselves on his lawn put him into the orbit of a married couple, two newcomer women, who have opened a vegetarian Mexican restaurant in a quiet town in—where else?—Maine. The locals don’t favor the couple with their business until—well, it would give too much away to talk about precipitating events, except to say that Scott has a way of being just where he’s needed in the midst of inclement weather, to say nothing of a gift for setting a good example of neighborliness. As befits the premise, King delivers an uncharacteristically slim novel, just a hair longer than a novella, and one wishes there were just a little more backstory to give depth to Scott’s good-guyness. Why is his reaching out to beleaguered neighbors important in “Trumpian” times? “It just is,” Scott tells us, before he finds a memorable—and quite beautiful, really—way to depart a Podunk town made all the better for his presence.
A touching fable with a couple of deft political jabs on the way to showing that it might just be possible for us all to get along.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0231-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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