Ease Reading-Find Your Next Favorite Book

Hot Search

Perfect Nightmare

john saul

... Show More
If you open your house to strangers, who knows who might come in. And what they might be after. Or whom. Now, ponder the unthinkable and surrender to your darkest dread, as sinister storyteller extraordinaire John Saul weaves a heart-stopping tale of lurking terror and twisted intent.

Every parent’s nightmare becomes reality for Kara Marshall when her daughter, Lindsay, vanishes from her bedroom during the night. The police suspect that the girl is just another moody teenage runaway, angry over leaving behind her school and friends because her family is moving. But Lindsay’s recent eerie claim – that someone invaded her room when the house was opened to prospective buyers – drives Kara to fear the worst: a nameless, faceless stalker has walked the halls of her home in search of more than a place to live.

Patrick Shields recognizes Kara’s pain – and carries plenty of his own since he lost his wife and two children in a devastating house fire. But more than grief draws Patrick and Kara together. He, too, senses the hand of a malevolent stranger in this tragedy. And as more people go missing from houses up for sale, Patrick’s suspicion, like Kara’s, blooms into horrified certainty.

Someone is trolling this peaceful community – undetected and undeterred – harvesting victims for a purpose no sane mind can fathom. Someone Kara and Patrick, alone and desperate, are determined to unmask. Someone who is even now watching, plotting, keeping a demented diary of unspeakable deeds... and waiting until the time is ripe for another fateful visit.

365 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1,2005

This edition

Format
365 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published
April 25, 2006 by Ballantine Books
ISBN
9780345467324
ASIN
0345467329
Language
English

More editions

About the author

Profile Image for john saul

john saul

... Show More
John Saul grew up in Whittier California where he graduated from Whittier High School in 1959. He attended several colleges—Antioch, in Ohio, Cerritos, in Norwalk, California, Montana State University and San Francisco State College, variously majoring in anthropology, liberal arts, and theater, but never obtaining a degree.
After leaving college, he decided the best thing for a college dropout to do was become a writer, and spent the next fifteen years working in various jobs while attempting to write a book someone would want to publish. Should anyone ever want to write a novel concerning the car-rental industry or the travails of temporary typists, John can provide excellent background material.

Those years garnered him a nice collection of unpublished manuscripts, but not a lot of money. Eventually he found an agent in New York, who spent several years sending his manuscripts around, and trying to make the rejection slips sound hopeful. Then, in 1976, one of his manuscripts reached Dell, who didn't want to buy it, but asked if he'd be interested in writing a psychological thriller. He put together an outline, and crossed his fingers.

At that point, things started getting bizarre. His agent decided the outline had all the makings of a best-seller, and so did Dell. Gambling on a first novel by an unknown author, they backed the book with television advertising (one of the first times a paperback original was promoted on television) and the gamble paid off. Within a month Suffer the Children appeared on all the best-seller lists in the country and made the #1 spot in Canada. Subsequently all 32 of his books, have made all the best-seller lists and have been published world wide. Though many of his books were published by Bantam/Doubleday/Dell his last fourteen books have been published by Ballantine/Fawcett/Columbine.

In addition to his work as novelist, John is also interested in the theater. He has acted, and as a playwright has had several one-act plays produced in Los Angeles and Seattle, and two optioned in New York. One of his novels was produced by Gerber Productions Company and M.G.M. as a C.B.S. movie and currently one of his novels is in development.

John served on the Expansion Arts Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts. He is actively involved with the development of other writers, and is a lecturer at the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference and the Maui Writers Conference and received the Life Time Achievement Award from the Northwest Writers Conference. John is also a trustee and Vice President of The Chester Woodruff Foundation (New York), a philanthropic organization.

John lives part-time in the Pacific Northwest, both in Seattle and in the San Juan Islands. He also maintains a residence on the Big Island of Hawaii. He currently enjoys motor homing, travel and golf. He is an avid reader, bridge player, golfer and loves to cook.

Readers also enjoyed

Community Reviews

Rating(4.1 / 5.0, 99 votes)
5 stars
35(35%)
4 stars
35(35%)
3 stars
29(29%)
2 stars
0(0%)
1 stars
0(0%)
99 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
xTimLim
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
3 STARS

"A woman's search for her missing daughter leads her into the twisted world of a madman's obsession." (From Amazon)

A good suspense thriller.
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
Colleen_C
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
Actual rating is 3.5 stars.

This book is about a kidnapper that gains access to people's houses by the means of open houses as these people attempt to sell their home. One of the victims is a teenage girl Lindsay and her mother never gives up hope of finding her. This is a horror thriller genre novel.

Creepy. This is the word I would use to describe this book. The idea of letting strangers into your house to peruse through the whole building is unsettling in itself. Then you add in the idea of kidnapper using this as his way to commit these crimes is just plain creepy. The sense of foreboding is throughout this book and it had me on edge. There were a couple of scenes where I knew something major was going to happen but had no idea how and what direction it would come from. I think I had to remind myself to breathe while reading these scenes. This book is also a whodunit as the reader tries to figure out the culprit. I did think the ending was a little streamlined and that is why I lowered my rating the half star. If the reason behind the kidnapper and the finale was fleshed out a little more this would have been an easy four star rating.

I wasn't expecting a lot with this book as I have a love/hate relationship with this author's books. I enjoy his books but there is always one little piece that makes me not love them. This happened in this book but not to a degree that I was disappointed. This book gave me some serious creepy vibes and reading it with the lights off did affect me in the good way of scaring me.
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
Reiusa
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
Hmm. This was alright. Alright in the sense that I cared enough to have something to say about it.

I don’t think that the writing was great, or even good. But it was enough to not put me off completely. The concept of a killer that stalks his victims through the real estate ads was clever.

But the “chilling” parts were just stupid. That the subjects could smell their attacker. It was just over the top, didn’t cause goosebumps, just reminded me that it was a silly paperback.

Also, the reasoning for the way the “baddie” was acting that was kind of just thrown out there in the end… it was quite a good reason. But it wasn’t talked about enough for me to know whether I was meant to feel sorry for him, or if it was just supposed to be known.

It had the potential to be a lot better. The end was badly written, too rushed, and the descriptions were silly, and there was a lot of needless bullshit throughout.
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
Glunpa
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
Listened to this audio book on a long drive. Found the plot with the open houses clever. I wasn't convinced about the smells and hearing the voices in the night. I did think I had the right murderer early on, but I was wrong!
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
Angelo_McGee
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
SPOILER ALERT

This is one of my favorite Saul books. He always has the creepy effect and does it so well he's almost as good as King. Even though I figured out who the "bad guy" was about halfway through the book it took a while for me to figure out it was him but just split personalities.
Who would suspect a nice rich man HELPING a mother look for her child? Spending money on the search for her?
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
SeksGod
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
Spoiler/Trigger Warning

Perfect Nightmare has a creepy start with its shadowy killer framing his murders as an accident. The killer has a journal where he records his killer thoughts- and having just read a book (Rose Madder) where I had to endure the antagonist's artless and gratuitiously-horrific thoughts I have to credit Perfect Nightmare in that these sections were breifer and less cringeworthy.

The characters are flat and their domestic life reads and feels like a basic family sitcom. The family is in the middle of moving and the teenager daughter is depressed because she wants to stay with her friends. What I like about John Saul is his blending of horror and luxury so there are plenty of grand houses to imagine and a cool hidden passage beneath the mansion library. I did think it was a disturbing and interesting angle to have the killer selecting open houses and hiding in them when the rest of the guests leave and waiting for his victims to be alone. The killer's lurking stealth was what I thought was most successful about the book.

Unfortunatley the twists were easy to predict (save for one which I'll get to shortly). The father dies in a poorly written drunk driving accident that is so telegraphed and overdone that it reads like a parody. The killer is capturing girls and keeping them in his dungeon (there is gross and gratuitous sexual objectification, and while it is never said that the girls are raped the fact that it is a sex dungeon is implied.). The book careens at the end when it's revealed that the killer has a split personality resulting from being repeatedly raped by his sister and her friend as a child in their playhouse... the killer ends up being the rich philanthropist who at the start of the book woke up in his estate's mausoleum next to his family's remains who mysteriously died in a fire- who would have guessed? While the whole time it was obvious who the killer was, the child rape aspect is presented in a way so that the reader sympathizes (?) with the killer or explains his insane motivations. When the killer is discovered and seems to realize how crazy he is and remembers his past trauma, he flees to his sisters house and kills her and then himself. The book has a rushed and unsatisfying end, where instead of providing resolution for the distraught mom in defeating her daughter's captor, the captor/gross villain gets to get his revenge on a minor character. The characters are paper thin. Some parts read so thinly its like you can follow along the flight of ideas where the desperation to fill the page and keep the paragraphs growing feels apparent.
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
TenKae
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
Not what I'm used to from Saul...nothing supernatural to this one. Just a disturbing thriller. Pretty good, with a sick twist that wasn't totally predictable. Worth the read.
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
hamifihekrix
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
A strong 3.5 suspense thriller….well well another adult read LOL I am trying it this year and reading them fast to get back to YA LOL…Trying to clean up my “recommended bookshelf” by reading and finally getting to every book that was given to me to read that I put away and got distracted by other books LOL…so this one was from an adult reading friend I work with that said this was her favorite author and I had to try one of his, turns out I have two others from somewhere also on my shelves---seemed like a sign to try and see how I like his style and have something to really go back to intelligently say to this reader who loves this author and genre..A thriller..
So this story starts with a husband and wife Kara and Steve contemplating moving away from her picturesque town in Long Island New York with her daughter Lindsay for life in the city—and she hates it..Moving her teenage daughter away from her school during her senior year is upsetting enough but its what must be done to keep their family together—as they start the process to sell their house and enter it online with an agent the narrative shifts to our villain and resident creep who is starting to stalk the young beautiful blond Lindsay and begin the perfect nightmare for anyone..…What if someone was in your house watching you, waiting for you?

“I am almost sure it is the house. A teenage girl lives there, and something inside me tells me she is perfect for me.” (Pg. 26)
“I hate being patient. But soon…soon, I shall see her, and touch her, and smell her. And she will know all the feelings I knew so long ago. But this time will be different. This time the feelings will go on forever. (Pg. 28)

After watching both seasons of You on Netflix about a seriously sick and unstable psycho stalker this book seems to be just along that vein of extreme obsession and I am here for it.. This book was rich in character development and there are several creepy scary guys in this town—however the reveal to me did not utilize all the detailed creepiness this story is full of-the real estate guys, and the butler, man almost every guy in this book were candidates so the one chosen and his backstory felt lackluster to me..I did enjoy the pacing, the terror and the overall writing but I feel it could have been tighter in closing loose ends, fleshing out the mind of this deranged man and upping the suspense of it all..I liked this author though, think the premise was engaging enough and will definitely read more but this one was not all I wanted it to be and all it could have been a higher rating….









0 0 Reply
Leave a Review
You must be logged in to rate and post a review. Register an account to get started.