I've been wanting to read a book written by John Saul for a while because I love horrors and thrillers so I've got a few collected for TBR and just finally got around to reading this one first. I did read it quite fast as it took me only a day and a half but it was smooth and captivating for a while until the ending which felt very rushed. It left too much mystery after the fact especially the point of the diaries and other things that he mentioned but didn't follow through on like what was the point of them at all?? And when it all came about for the very end it just confused me even more and left me feeling unsatisfied although the creepy/scary factor was definitely there before the ending because of how easy it was for him to gain access to these women through something as simple as an open house. I don't believe that I ever want to go that route when I eventually sell my own house lol. I still wish he had thrown something ghostly or monstrous in it.

Poor Lindsay. She's set to graduate from high school next year with all her friends when her parents tell her they’ve decided to move back to NYC. She’s devastated. When she disappears, the police think she’s run away. Her mother knows that’s not what happened. This is the first John Saul novel I’ve read in a dozen years, and I wasn’t disappointed. This was more a mystery/thriller than a horror story.

This is not one of John Saul's best books, but then again, when you say John Saul you say cliche book. All his books contain some sort of drama, usually concerning children, always in a backwater town or suburb, always playing the child in danger, family connection, deep instinctual fears, etc. But some of them are more interesting than others, me liking science related books more, even if I almost always relate to the mad scientists and their evil creations than to the pseudo-moral rednecks that fight against them. This one is plain boring.

The Perfect Nightmare is about a child abductor. He goes for young innocent girls, he takes them into a makeshift playhouse and "plays" with them. Being a mass production book, it presents some brutal violence, almost no sex at all, even if it hints towards it, and the first and largest part of the book is simply puffed with the actions and fears of the people left behind which are mostly average boring people. This makes the book average and boring. The murderer himself is not something truly original, neither is the way he is portrayed.

The ending of the book has a catch, but after reading 90% of it, it doesn't really has any effect. Bottom line: not even for John Saul fans.

Its been ALOT of years since I picked up a John Saul

Very good and exciting read couldn't put it down I would recommend this book if you

Want to pass some time away a bit sexy in parts but well written you are left wandering who does it right till the very end

I felt this one was pretty good...a little slow in the beginning to get into, but once it picked up, it got a bit better. I was able to figure out who the kidnapper/killer was though pretty quickly. Not a bad read, but not the best either!

this was okayyyyyy

the storyline was interesting, but it wasn’t my cup of tea. the usual thrillers that i read (such as the silent patient by alex michaelides or the only one left by riley sager) are scary of course, but not to this extent. this book had a lot of torture and had children involved which really turned me off. it was creepy and made me very uneasy. moreover, this book was about kidnapping young females which also scared me since i’m a young girl myself

I was enchanted by John Saul when I first encountered his debut novel "Suffer the Children" last year. Since then, I have read no less than three more novels of his (this would be four, except I didn't finish "Punish the Sinners" due to its overegged religious horror), and will be starting on "The Unloved" soon. I say all this because I want it understood that, as harsh as this review is going to be, that harshness comes from someone who has not let this particular disappointing outing destroy my love for the author.

And the worst of it is, I was sure up until the ending that this would be at least a four star read. I read this book in two sittings, in a single day. I could not put it down, as with so many other Saul efforts. However, because I'd read other Saul before this, I will admit I went into this book with one major complication to my enthusiasm: namely, I was quite sure before I began that the ending would be a complete disappointment.

This is not due to a defect in Saul's talent: rather, his disappointing endings appear to be an intentional artistic choice. He likes to leave his stories unresolved, often ending at the precise minute before everything that happened can be explained or understood. I think he prefers to leave his readers' imaginations to do the work, in the hopes that the lack of resolution will make the story linger and make us churn out our own horrific version of the precise explanation for everything that has occurred. And for weird fiction, as many of Saul's early outings are, there is something to recommend this approach.

Unfortunately, even making allowances for that sort of intentional choice, this particular book is a failure. And a failure, moreover, because of the explanation that Saul does give us, rather than the one he doesn't. If I wanted to avoid spoilers altogether, I would say that when a book has a twist ending, as this one does, it must have done something to establish the possibility of that ending happening in order to not seem like the twist is a cheat by the author. What Saul attempts to do here breaks that rule completely. His twist is not foreshadowed at all. What he does is more like, say, trying to write "Silence of the Lambs" without ever mentioning Buffalo Bill's desire to switch genders, and then springing it on us out of the blue at the climax. Imagine how much less that sort of twist would be appreciated if it were just dropped on you out of the blue rather than meticulously constructed to explain Buffalo Bill before we even know who he is, and you have some idea of how disappointing this book's revelation is.

Mind you, if the villain of this piece were simply an inscrutable cipher, this would be a slightly more excusable omission. But the villain here is anything but indecipherable. We read journal entries from his point of view. We know his mindset. We know what he wants. We also read chapters from the point of view of people who are not just close to him, but know him as intimately as one can know anyone, and not once is the prospect of what is really going on even hinted at. It all just comes as a big Diabolus Ex Machina at the end, and worse still, because of Saul's allergy to explanations, we get no chance to dive into the implications of what we've read, or even to get a detailed look at what caused our villain to become the way he is.

Again, this would be excusable if Saul were dealing in weird fiction. But this is a wholly realistic novel dealing with a serial child abductor. In stories like that, the psychology of the fiend responsible -- and trying to use it to guess his or her identity -- is basically the money shot that keeps us reading. And make no mistake, Saul does everything else that one is supposed to do in a mystery perfectly: he lays false trails, gives us harrowing accounts of the victims' existence, drops tantalizingly grim hints about the kidnapper's (literally) childish motivations, and then builds to a fantastic climax through a combination of convincingly spontaneous misadventures by our main protagonists. Even his kidnapper's MO of stalking open houses and hiding in dark corners in order to abduct his quarry is unsettling enough and carried off with enough uncanny competence to recall vampire fiction. But this dreadful firecracker never explodes: it simply fizzles out. For my part, I can only hope that this book was just the result of a few too many slow days on Saul's part.

Lindsay Marshall (from Camden Green, Long Island) has one more year of high school and then she graduates. But her parents want to sell their house and move to New York City because Lindsay’s father’s job is there, and her parents are seeing less and less of each other since he has to stay at a small apartment in the city. Lindsay is upset to leave all her friends behind, and she hates the city. When their house is opened to prospective buyers Lindsay feels her room has been invaded, it has a strange smell and she thinks someone was lying on her pillow. It is giving her the creeps. But her parents brush her fears aside. The next time their agent holds an open house for them, Lindsay vanishes, never to be seen again. It is later revealed that this has happened to a few other females after they had open houses. Is there a connection? Is someone abducting these girls?

A totally scary story about a crazy kidnapper who gets access to his victims through visiting the open houses of the homes they are selling. I really felt for Lindsay’s mom (Kara) and everything she went through, along with the victims. This book had lots of tense and disturbing situations. A creepy, dark, and captivating read by John Saul.

I can always count on John Saul to creep me out with a good story. While Perfect Nightmare isn't one of my favorites, I haven't yet read a book of his that I didn't like. The premise of this story is extremely unsettling - a traumatic event in a young boy's life results in his becoming a pedophile as an adult, except he doesn't know he's a pedophile. He abducts his victims by sneaking into their homes during an Open House completely undetected. Unmasking the monster in this tale wasn't too difficult, but the ending was nonetheless shocking. If you have enjoyed other books by John Saul, chances are you will enjoy this one too.

This was my third John Saul book and I LOVED the other two so I think I had lofty expectations for this one. It just didn’t come together as a plot like other Saul novels have. It was also not nearly as clever with its twist. The characters were just fine and lacked a lot of depth. The novel was still super readable and exciting enough to breeze through. It was didn’t live up to the lofty expectations I had for some of the other Saul novels I’ve read. Still fun.

Had me on the edge of my seat. I couldn't put the book down!!