A fitfully chilling variation on James's old-fashioned damsel- in-demonic-distress theme (Dreamer, 1990; Possession, 1988) finds Charley Witney and her lawyer-husband moving into a country house- -which turns out to be haunted by a most malevolent ghost. Looking to rekindle their marriage—which has been cooling, thanks to their inability to conceive a child—Charley and Tom buy Elmwood Mill, a dilapidated 15th-century mill house in Sussex. Before long, odd events (much like those in James's earlier novels) begin: a befuddled elderly ghost walks a nearby hill; cold spots plague the house; the couple's electric bill soars from a mysterious drainage. And what's worse, these occult disturbances are echoed in mundane life as Tom takes up with Charley's former clothing-shop colleague (a liaison as sexually graphic as the story's ensuing violence is gory, marking a striking departure from James's demure first two novels). All these troubles, though, take a backseat to the revelations that unfold as Charley, visiting London, undergoes past-life hypnosis therapy to uncover a possible psychological cause for her infertility. Entranced into the same recent past life time and again, she relives a sexual encounter in a car and her burial of a locket. Back at Elmwood Mill, she finds herself sleepwalking, digging up the locket, and then, horrifyingly, trying to hang herself while asleep. A final hypnotic session, sufficiently terrifying to strike the hypnotist dead, uncovers the secret behind Charley's woes—one stemming from the homicidal sins of her mother, and powerful enough to free, in an exciting climactic stalk-and-slash, the vengeful spirit behind all this mayhem. Well written, with nice scares and very rich characters, but, here, James is basically repeating himself (and fellow Jameses Henry and M.R.), despite the sex-gore overlay. The formula is wearing a bit thin.
Pub Date: Dec. 18, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-06477-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
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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