Perfect for fans of Stephen King’s IT, a group of friends return to their hometown to confront a nightmare they first stumbled on as teenagers in this mesmerizing odyssey of terror.
An atmospheric, haunting thriller, full of memorable characters and sublime terror, from the author of Come with Me
For nearly two decades, Jamie Warren has been running from darkness. He’s haunted by a traumatic childhood and the guilt at having disappeared from his disabled brother’s life. But then a series of unusual events reunites him with his estranged brother and their childhood friends, and none of them can deny the sense of fate that has seemingly drawn them back together.
Nor can they deny the memories of that summer, so long ago—the strange magic taught to them by an even stranger man, and the terrible act that has followed them all into adulthood. In the light of new danger, they must confront their past by facing their futures, and hunting down a man who may very well be a monster.
I’ve tried to read Malfi before, but never made it through the book. A good friend tossed me this one, having just finished it herself, telling me she wasn’t sure what she thought about it yet.
I like a challenge.
So, this is IT by way of DREAMCATCHER‘s Duddits but with far less charm.
The concept wasn’t bad, though it was fairly easy to guess the twist at about the halfway point. I think this could have been a far more solid horror novel if…well…if Malfi had maybe offered up some horror in the first third of the book. It was an awful lot of set-up, only to set the expectation for the reader that these four characters were the ones we were following, only to have another major one introduced very late in the game.
So, that was strike one. Strike two? The fact that Malfi felt it necessary to insert a Duddits-style character in Dennis. That is, a mentally challenged younger brother who holds all the answers but is incapable of relaying them well. Why does Dennis have this connection to the magician? How can he know everything he knows?
Because reasons. Lazy. Sorry, but this? This is just lazy.
The final strike is just for the pacing of the entire novel, as well as some decisions toward the end. We go way too far back for the start of the novel, going through Jamie Warren’s almost firing due to his alcoholism, then through his stint in rehab, then being back on the job, before he finally gets the call that mom has died. This should have been a page-long flashback as Jamie’s on his way home, not pages and pages and pages.
And it was like this throughout the novel. It’s dark. It’s grim. Jamie’s broken because he’s fighting booze. Clay is broken because of his skin pigment issue. Mia is broken because of the circumstances of her upbringing. Dennis is broken because…well, we’ve covered that. And they’re all broken because they grew up in the shadow of Black Mouth. Which is fine. See how quickly I laid it out here? You’ll get entire damn chapters going over and over and over it in the novel.
I won’t spoil the ending, but the decision to not use all the characters for the final confrontation was simply…confusing. Hey reader, I’m gonna give you a full book of characters and lay out their histories, only to essentially forget them at the end. Cool?
Yeah, not cool.
So, yes, this one simply did not grab me. Was the narrative style good? Yes. I enjoyed the actual writing. But it was what was written about that left me cold.
One more author to scratch off the list, I guess.
