A page-turner that places a premium on shocking its readers.
A monstrous criminal descends upon a small town in Clark’s gory thriller.
Six years ago, Elliot Keller raped and murdered three young women in a cabin near Virginia’s Appalachian Trail. Now he’s serving time at the Virginia Maximum Correctional Institution. He’s a smooth-talking, low-maintenance prisoner, which leads to him getting a coveted overnight laundry detail. He plans to escape during one of the prison’s routine night deliveries and sate his appetite for violence. Meanwhile, in the cozy town of Thompson Trails, Virginia, a massive storm approaches. Sheriff Robert Brown makes the rounds, checking in on citizens, including Rick and Donna Welk, who own a series of lakeside cabins near the Appalachian Trail. Although the storm makes the likelihood of anyone renting a cabin slim, Rick and Donna are prepared for anything. Suddenly, a man who calls himself Elias Derringer steps from the wilderness and into their establishment. Rick is hospitable, offering him coffee, but he gets a bad feeling from the stranger. He doesn’t plan to rent a room to him for even one night and instead points him toward the local sheriff to help him continue on through Thompson Trails. When Elias ends up in a cell for the night, overseen by Deputy Darren Rush, his diabolical plan begins. Clark creates a memorable villain in this gripping thriller. Readers learn how Keller, during his childhood, witnessed “unspeakable things” that imprinted on him and inform the sadism that he inflicts on own victims. Clark’s energetic prose intensifies descriptions of brutality: “His head was nothing more than a bloody pulp with a small spot of brain pulsating grotesquely from his frontal lobe.” However, casual thriller fans may find such moments, as well as those depicting sexual violence, gratuitous. The tale works best as an over-the-top horror piece, as no other aspect of the narrative supersedes Clark’s penchant for savagery. The twist ending, however, will strike some readers as unearned moralizing.
A page-turner that places a premium on shocking its readers.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8414142461
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.
The master of modern horror returns with a loose-knit parapsychological thriller that touches on territory previously explored in Firestarter and Carrie.
Tim Jamieson is a man emphatically not in a hurry. As King’s (The Outsider, 2018, etc.) latest opens, he’s bargaining with a flight attendant to sell his seat on an overbooked run from Tampa to New York. His pockets full, he sticks out his thumb and winds up in the backwater South Carolina town of DuPray (should we hear echoes of “pray”? Or “depraved”?). Turns out he’s a decorated cop, good at his job and at reading others (“You ought to go see Doc Roper,” he tells a local. “There are pills that will brighten your attitude”). Shift the scene to Minneapolis, where young Luke Ellis, precociously brilliant, has been kidnapped by a crack extraction team, his parents brutally murdered so that it looks as if he did it. Luke is spirited off to Maine—this is King, so it’s got to be Maine—and a secret shadow-government lab where similarly conscripted paranormally blessed kids, psychokinetic and telepathic, are made to endure the Skinnerian pain-and-reward methods of the evil Mrs. Sigsby. How to bring the stories of Tim and Luke together? King has never minded detours into the unlikely, but for this one, disbelief must be extra-willingly suspended. In the end, their forces joined, the two and their redneck allies battle the sophisticated secret agents of The Institute in a bloodbath of flying bullets and beams of mental energy (“You’re in the south now, Annie had told these gunned-up interlopers. She had an idea they were about to find out just how true that was"). It’s not King at his best, but he plays on current themes of conspiracy theory, child abuse, the occult, and Deep State malevolence while getting in digs at the current occupant of the White House, to say nothing of shadowy evil masterminds with lisps.
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-1056-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
Sharply drawn characters, a “locked-room” location, and a tension-filled WWII setting illuminate this wartime thriller.
During World War II, a female police officer investigates a spate of murders on a tiny island off the coast of Massachusetts.
Oren’s novel opens arrestingly with a local police captain discovering a fisherman’s unexpected catch of a human body. Then, an initial assessment of death by drowning goes distinctly south when it turns out that the man was strangled. Things only get trickier from there since it’s wartime, 1944, and the corpse is that of a prisoner of war: The island, along with its docks, trawlers, and cranberry bogs, includes a prison camp of Italian POWs and a U.S. military emplacement headed by a lieutenant who’d prefer to be on the front lines (his wealthy family ensures that he’s not). To complicate matters further—especially when another murder victim emerges—the police captain is Mary Beth Swann, who took over her husband’s law enforcement role when he shipped out to the South Pacific. Being a female police officer was already challenging enough; Mary Beth, originally from Boston, also has to tolerate the disrespect of the island’s inhabitants. What elevates this intriguing story—comparisons with television’s always engaging Foyle’s War are inevitable—are the wonderfully delineated specifics of the location and characters. This island may be fictional, but it’s drawn directly from the author’s experiences on Nantucket, and each of the characters sparkles with their own vitality, including the town’s brothel madam, the Acadian short-order cook missing two fingers, a visiting gangster, and the nearly 90 Italians waiting out the war in a remote corner of a foreign land.
Sharply drawn characters, a “locked-room” location, and a tension-filled WWII setting illuminate this wartime thriller.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-950539-60-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
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