Ease Reading-Find Your Next Favorite Book

Hot Search

Hellfire

john saul

... Show More
Pity the dead. For one hundred years the old mill has stood silent, its dread secrets locked away and barred from view. Still the people of Westover, Massachusetts, remember--remember and whisper of that fateful day when horrifying flames claimed eleven innocent lives. The day the mill's iron doors slammed shut--forever.Pray for the living. Now Westover is a sleepy town tucked away beyond the Interstate, all but forgotten. Now, the last of the once-powerful Sturgess family dreams of reopening the mill. Now Philip Sturgess is about to unlock the doors to the past...and unleash an elemental fury. For beyond those doors, padlocked for so many years, deep within the dark, abandoned building, a terrible vengeance waits. A vengeance conceived in...Hellfire.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1,1986
Places
the united states of america, 

This edition

Format
352 pages, Hardcover
Published
October 8, 1987 by Arrow (A Division of Random House Group)
ISBN
9780712611640
ASIN
0712611649
Language
English
Characters More characters

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Those years garnered him a nice collection of unpublished manuscripts, but not a lot of money.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(3.9 / 5.0, 100 votes)
5 stars
24(24%)
4 stars
43(43%)
3 stars
33(33%)
2 stars
0(0%)
1 stars
0(0%)
100 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
HidamariSeashore
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
A period piece at first, complete with horse drawn carriages and farm estate... quickly became a tragic episode of murder on murder, with lots of blame on ghosts from the past. Parts enjoyable, but also a lag until I got halfway into it.
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
MissBlinou92
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
I pretty much read every John Saul book that I could find in the 80ies from my local library and then for some reason I either fell out of love with his brand of ghoul or my library no longer carried his books and I have not read one in a very long time.
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
BackSlash
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
I don't really know what to think. The writing was good and the characters were fleshed out, but they were all either really good or really bad and no real intermediate levels. It was like watching a slow burn horror movie only instead of a slow burn there were several scenes that went real quick and then went back to almost nothing. By the end I just really wanted to see what was going to happen and the ending was perhaps the most disappointing part. I found no satisfaction in either the last chapter or the epilogue and feel as though there was a better way to end it that would bring some sense of closure. So as I sit here writing this review I give it 3 stars on literary merit alone, but with the note that I didn't find it as entertaining as I would've liked. I will definitely try Saul again as I've come across a couple of his books and I always give authors a second chance.
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
SSJayso
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
We all die sooner or later…

Hellfire is all about rich people problems, jealous horse girls, and a vengeful spirit which all make for a rough and rowdy soap opera good time. Perfect? Not at all. Entertaining escapism? Sure thing. My only wish is more gore. Thanks.

90% family drama. 10% PG-13 supernatural spooks.

Good enough to finish.

Also, no one told me John Saul was gay. Go off. I will be looking for more of his gentle horrors to read in the future.
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
Lafeyer
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
A decent read by Saul. Blue blood Phillip marries a 'common' wife much to the displeasure of his family, and especially his teenage daughter. Besides the nasty family dynamics (Phillip's daughter Tracy is really evil), the novel centers on an old shoe mill in the small New England town that has been shut for 100 years. Phillip wants to turn the old building into a shopping mall, but we soon learn that the mill has a very dark history, and one that is still haunting the place.
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
Silmarien_Prince
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
Not one of my favorite John Saul books. Was pretty slow for most of it... But in the end, was a decent ghost story.
0 0 Reply
Leave a Review
You must be logged in to rate and post a review. Register an account to get started.