Commendable horror tales that confirm dread can be just as terrifying, if not more so, as whatever’s out there.
Sinister beings, human or otherwise, populate this collection of grim, disturbing stories.
The eponymous tale sets the book’s somber tone at the outset: 10-year-old intellectually disabled Emma McCann vanishes from her home in 1974. As in the stories that follow, there’s not only an ominous menace, but an overall hostility as well. Emma’s parents, for example, isolate their unwanted daughter, cared for by domestic servant Harriet Cartwright. The detective investigating the girl’s disappearance suspects her neglectful parents, but semiretired history professor John Durham has already spotted a pattern. Girls have disappeared every 17 years for nearly two centuries, meaning the abductor, or killer, may be something otherworldly. Similarly, in “The Lurker,” Courtney Sheffield’s tormented by Alvin Roach, whose deliberate encounters with her at their mutual workplace escalate into full-blown stalking. He winds up in prison, but his eventual escape sends Courtney into hiding at her sister’s cabin, terrified that he’ll somehow find her. The title character of “The Restlessness of Arvind Mehta” isn’t sure what he’s afraid of, burdened for years by a sense of unease—a feeling that something awful has either happened or will happen. A doctor for a correctional facility, he feels his anxiety may finally be explained when he meets Chester Dean Willits, an ailing serial killer on his deathbed and responsible for 47 murders. Lamb’s (The Fading, 2015) prose is terse and generally metaphor-free, an effective approach that tends to make the horror palpable. When Courtney, for instance, “can feel eyes upon her,” it’s most likely because someone’s actually watching her. “Motel 47” features a rare sign of humor, as Bob Gibson, driving through a severe storm, listens to radio tunes with titles echoing his dire predicament. But even that turns dark when Queen’s “Keep Yourself Alive” pops up. “The Reunion,” meanwhile, initially appears to be the least gloomy of the five stories: widower Bill Miller bumps into a childhood crush just before their upcoming 30-year high school reunion. But it takes a startling turn (or two), while stories with seemingly happy endings are overshadowed by a lingering threat—trepidation might not go away so easily after all.
Commendable horror tales that confirm dread can be just as terrifying, if not more so, as whatever’s out there.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5372-6296-3
Page Count: 200
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
At their best, Laymon's cackling horrors (The Stake, 1991; Night Visions 7, 1989) are the nastiest around—sleek, black- humored, skirting (if not slipping over) the edge of pornoviolence. Here, though, he injects them into a floundering picaresque historical about Jack the Ripper—set partly in the Old West- -resulting in his only seriously dull book yet. Even Laymon's usual thrumming prose is missing here, replaced by a faux-plucky narration (``It wasn't a job I could walk away from''; ``Right then I vowed to save her'') by 15-year-old Londoner Trevor Bentley, who, one dark-and-stormy night in 1988, goes searching for a bobby to corral the lout who's beaten his mom. Wandering the streets, Trevor is attacked by thugs who strip him; seeking clothes, he breaks into an apartment but hides under the bed when the occupant returns—a whore accompanied by none other than the Ripper, who mutilates the woman while the boy cowers inches below: a wicked beginning that Laymon soon squanders. Trevor follows ``the fiend'' only to be shanghaied—along with luscious young Trudy Armitage—aboard the Armitage family yacht, which the Ripper has pirated, aiming to sail to the fresh killing-ground of America. Sundry tortures, mostly of Trudy, make the voyage pass quickly; arriving in the US, the Ripper rips Trudy and escapes, trailed by Trevor, who loses his prey but is taken in by a retired general and his daughter, who tutors the boy in sex. Long months later, reading of savage murders in Tombstone, Trevor rides the rails west, where he takes up with outlaws, dallies with yet another pretty girl, and, at last, confronts the Ripper in a blood- spouting finale. Laymon dedicates this meandering mistake to his agent, who, he says, suggested ``an English setting...so this book is your fault.'' Okay—but Laymon himself should have known better. And next time, with luck, will.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-10537-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
Contemporary ghost yarn from the author of Giant Bones (1997), etc. Thirteen-year-old Jenny Gluckstein leaves New York with her mother, Sally, to live with her new family, English stepfather Evan and stepbrothers Tony and Julian, in bucolic Dorset, England. Agricultural biologist Evan will invigorate a rundown farm and fix up its huge, dilapidated old manor house. Meanwhile, Jenny seethes with resentment at the unwelcome relocation—until she discovers that the house is haunted by a mischievous boggart. Next, her beloved Mister Cat finds his way up to the closed-off third floor, returning with a ghost cat that only Jenny can see! She talks things over with the boggart, then banishes him with a gift of reading spectacles. Up on the third floor, Jenny meets the ghost of Tamsin Willoughby, who died aged 20 more than 300 years ago. In Tamsin’s company, Jenny meets other supernatural creatures: the shapeshifting, untrustworthy Pooka, the ominous Black Dog, the billy-blind with his badly timed good advice—and the terrifying Wild Hunt screaming across the sky. Slowly, talking with local historians, drawing out Tamsin’s recollections, Jenny pieces together a tragic story that hinges on the 17th-century Monmouth rebellion and its aftermath, the bloody reprisals exacted by Judge Jeffries. But what dreadful secret binds the ghosts of Tamsin and her innocent sweetheart together with the Judge’s horrid, monomaniacal shade—and the terrible Wild Hunt itself? An appealing intermingling of history, folklore, and the supernatural, but no real chills or tension—and lively young Jenny simply overwhelms everybody else.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-451-45763-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: ROC/Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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