wishing he got the Doc too. Great read.

June 2013, Kristin G, Fiction

I really enjoy John sauls ideas. John Saul writes great books and I will probably read all of John sauls books. The bad part of this John Saul book is the same as I shown in this review. Most every time he mentions someone’s name, it’s first and last. Throughout it just feels as if he was padding to meet a page/word requirement. Great story idea, but the name thing was in my head the whole time.

Although this story was very predictable, the ending made the whole thing worth it

Really enjoyed this book. Mark is very much the sweet innocent underdog you will always pull for.

I was very disappointed with this book. It was below his normal standards in my opinion. To the genres listed they should add fantasy to the list. This book was so far out there it just made no sense, and the editing in this book lacked as well. This John Saul book was a miss for me.

This started off well & I had high hopes, but then it just went downhill.
It was repetitive, boring & predictable. A large majority of the male characters are jerks who treat their wives like dirt - they don't listen to anything they say, ignore their feelings & do things behind their backs because they know better. Hello misogyny!
There were no likable characters, except for Chivas the dog.

A fantastic story of genetic mutations that flounders towards the end. Still, a fan and short read. More thriller and less horror.

At first I was a bit disappointed, the book felt very predictable and almost boring in its execution. The last 40ish pages made up for it. Even though I saw where it was going, I thought the suspension build was very good because of how cultish the company and town is. Upper class business men willing to risk the sanity of their wives and humanity of their sons, all for having the perfect masculine son in their eyes. The message is a bit heavy handed, the whole letting masculine aggressiveness dominate everything begins to turn men to animals, but I think the hyperbole works okay here. Still wish they had started pumping hormones in and beefing up the teenage girls.

Read in 1992

Didn’t enjoy this one as much as House of reckoning but it was fine. Utterly predictable and, again, reads like a
point horror novel but a solid enough time waster.

Saul cheats reality to get his genre moments and the story builds up an oppressive darkness. It’s from 1989 but it’s target, toxic masculinity, is current. Corporate greed and high school football are smashed together with a kind of riff on drugs as performance enhancers—except these drugs come with a side-effect of turning some users into ape men. Because it’s so grimly silly, the one-dimensional sketches don’t insult but Saul loses the novel towards the end by promoting nihilistic story elements that scuttle our chance at fun and redemption. This is the only Saul I’ve read and I must wonder if he always treats his readers with sadism.