This book literally took me on a roller coaster ride... I strongly recommend it, it has a little bit of everything. I usually don't pick these kind of books but this blew my mind away. If you are looking for a book but don't really know what kind you want to read you should definitely pick this one. I promise that it won't disappoint you :)

P.S. Prepare yourself to be surprised with the ending, but I can bet that you will love it.

I had actually read this one before, but since I couldn't figure out for sure until I was more than 50 pages in I decided it wouldn't hurt to read again. It was difficult to know whether I'd read it because John Saul is a rather formulaic author. But that doesn't stop me from reading him. I still rather enjoy his books, even if I can often guess the ending in the first 100 pages or so. Some of them stray from his usual formula, too. This is not one of them, the only thing it needed was to have the main characters moving to an isolated town, or a resort area in the off season to make it about as standard as they come. But I really like his descriptions of the human monster. And he often makes it seem like something supernatural must be going on, then explains it scientifically or psychologically. And that's just plain cool.

I've been reading John Saul for at least 20 years, and I finally got around to this one. Super disappointing and not what I expect from him. It reminded me of when you're in grade school and you have to write your first big paper, and to meet the length requirement, you say the same thing ten different ways. "But Cynthia was dead!" "Cynthia had been dead for years!" "Cynthia couldn't be responsible, she had died so long ago!". If this was my first Saul book, I wouldn't have read more. Try his earlier stuff.

John Saul’s books can scare you silly, and this one is no different. Disappearance and murder point to one main suspect, who unfortunately can’t say for sure if he committed the crimes or not because his mind isn’t working correctly. Saul packs this story with so many red herrings that you won’t know what to think, but I promise that you’ll be looking over your shoulder for days to come after you finish this book!

Tales about ghosts are one of my favorites. Nightshade, however, leaves you wondering. Is this a ghost story, or a tale about a woman who went mad? I did have some issues with this book. Matthew Moore, for instance. I don't think his mother could have enrolled him in school without a birth certificate or some sort of identification. Also, how could Emily not have known that Cynthia was dead? Or did she? That wasn't clear. I'm not going to list everything that made me raise an eyebrow because overall I did think it was a good story. I found it easy to sympathize with Joan Hapgood and understand her madness. The ending was good, creepy.

This book had alittle bit of everything in it, i definitely could not put it down. And if you can easily be offended dont read it, this book is filled with triggers. But if your looking for a insane what did i just read type of book then here you go !!!!

Very eerie.

Kept me guessing all the way through. Looking forward to more of John Sauls books. So far all I have read I enjoyed.

There was not a time in my life when I didn’t love to read and when I didn’t appreciate a good horror story. By the time I was 12 or 13 YA horror stories were far too predictable and tame for me and I moved on to authors such as Stephen King, Anne Rice and John Saul. Although I never came close to reading everything John Saul wrote, I read quite a few of his books and specifically remember loving Nathaniel so much that I read it multiple times. Granted, my reading at thirty *cough* something is different than my teenage self. Even so, John Saul is one of those authors who I really liked, and I was looking forward to livening up my daily commute by revisiting him.

Apparently my teenage self wasn’t quite the reading snob I thought I was, because Nightshade was horrible. Had I been reading it (rather than listening to the audio version on my way to and from work), it for sure would have been quit after a chapter or two. However, the poor writing quality was just enough that I could concentrate on traffic without missing too much of the story.

Where to begin? Let’s see… Nightshade is the master of telling rather than showing. At no point did the story simply unfold on its own. John Saul told us everything. The majority of the story took place in the form of inner monologue, thoughts and feelings. There was very little dialogue or action. The story was told from an omniscient point of view and we heard the thoughts and some history of so many characters whose inner motivations (or personal conflicts and drama) didn’t really matter to the story. Regarding the characters, everyone was so one dimensional and predictable. Characters either did exactly what was expected of them, or behaved in bizarre ways without their behavior being explained or rationalized at all. Mysteries were only mysteries because John Saul chose to withhold important plot points until the near end of the book. There were issues of mental illness, jealously, delusions, dream sequences and paranormal activity and haunting. Strangely though people were unable to recognize severe mental illness in friends and family members, but ghostly possession put them on the alert that something just isn’t right within seconds of a person becoming possessed. And because John Saul apparently felt the need to cover his poor writing skills with a little shock value, there was some gratuitous violence, a snuff scene/dream sequence and incestuous statutory rape.

In addition to all of the above, the technical writing was beyond redundant. If only I weren’t driving while listening I would have paused and written examples down to share here. But, you will have to take my word for it that so many scenes went something like this,

“When Matt awoke, he smelled a rotten stench. Looking around he saw a person’s dead body covered in blood and flies only a mere feet from him. Suddenly he knew what the rotten stench he smelled upon first awakening was. It was the smell of a putrid corpse”

Well, fucking duh!!! Finally, there were little technical errors that should have been caught by the editor. For example, a woman who was applying makeup used her “pot of rogue.” Who the heck calls it blush “rogue” anymore or still refers to it coming in a pot? At one point, a character wants to know who teenage Matt Moore’s father is, so he spends an afternoon doing internet research. Despite the fact that the man doing the research isn’t a cop, detective, or hacker (he publishes a local, small town community interest paper) he decides that Matt’s mother cannot be his birth mother because, he could find no record of her giving birth anywhere. Um… hello HIPPA???

I didn’t go into this novel expecting it to be great, and even so was overwhelmingly disappointed. Interestingly, when investigating John Saul here on Goodreads, it seems that soo many people also loved him when they were younger teenagers. Huh. And I always felt like such a lone weirdo, being a Catholic School girl who loved reading horror paperbacks in the mid eighties ;) Perhaps John Saul’s entire fan base is comprised of socially awkward, book worm wanna-be rebels? LOL.

Chances are I will give John Saul another try. Rather than read something new, I’d like to go back to one of my old favorites of his. Nathaniel, The God Project or Brain Child. Something he wrote when he was still in his prime. But Nightshade? I’d like to say this was a waste of time, but it did keep me entertained on my way to and from work. Barely.

John Saul's haunting novel "Nightshade" had me staying up past my bedtime as I was quite engrossed in it. Horrors from a childhood better left forgotten reemerge when Matt's grandmother moves in. Plagued with dementia, the old lady is convinced her dead daughter Cynthia has come home - much to little sister Joan's dismay.
When a tragedy rocks the family, Matt's life is turned upside down and soon gets worse. People start to go missing and Aunt Cynthia starts visiting Matt leaving behind her scent of Nightshade.
With Matt suspected of murder, grandma missing and Joan battling her ghostly sister, long buried secrets are thrown in the spotlight and reach a bloody terrifying climax.

A terrifying wild roller coaster ride from the highs of best friends looking out for best friends in a peaceful, small, innocuous New England town, to the lows into the depths of madness; and through the house of mirrors where the people reflected in those mirrors are not quite who they appear to be.

A thriller with psychological elements with a dose of the supernatural thrown in.

An interesting commentary on our times when evil incarnate is unleashed among us and who we thought "did it" is not who it turns out to be. Our theory is far more innocent; while the truth is inconceivable.

3.25/5
This was another well-written John Saul novel. The setup was great and the ending was spine-tingling but the story sagged in the middle and I found myself just thinking "Get on with it" a few times.

It was a pretty good book in which the plot gradually gets more and more involved. The end was a little simple in that there was nothing said about the way Matt was treated by his classmates and the people in the town or his relationship with his mother/aunt who was, tragically, the victim in a lot of ways. It was sad, because the abuse she had received when she was little tragically ended in her going insane. But, it was also well written in that you really didn't see her being the person who did all the killing until you were pretty far into the book.