re-read April 2021. Not quite as spectacular as I though when I was younger, but still a page turner.

Well I really enjoyed that! A rather bizarre story, but I felt engaged the whole time. The atmosphere and setting of the book I thought was phenomenal. Definitely a weird and spooky one, so if you're not into that, this is probably not for you.

Well, that was definitely fucked up.

I've sat on this one for a couple days and still don't know how I feel about it. I keep going back and forth between 2 and 4 stars, so I'll just split the difference and call it a day.

I usually don't bother with trigger warnings, but I'll just throw out that this pretty much has them all.

DEJAD A LOS NIÑOS... Lo acabo de terminar de leer y aún me encuentro en shock. Aún no puedo sacar de mi cabeza tantas escenas perturbadoras y un final de los más inesperado.
No recuerdo otro libro que me haya hecho sentir sofocado y con una especie de presión mientras avanzaba en la lectura. Definitivamente esta novela me ha dejado marcado para siempre.
No sé si ser padre de una niña de 3 años sea factor para que me haya causado tanto miedo y desesperación. Creo que sí.

De igual forma creo que es una joya de la literatura de horror contemporánea y
definitivamente me ha quedado claro porque los libros de JOHN SAUL no son aptos para cualquier persona.

Léelo bajo tu propio riesgo.

Yo por mi parte me he prometido volver a leerlo algún día. Pero para eso tendrán que pasar muchos, muchos años. Estas huellas no se borrarán pronto.

I'm not going to say this book's ending is the best ever written, but it did change my attitude. I finally understood the characters, and therefore my believability in the story changed. It can be especially hard to buy into the situation of children in a horror novel. I was never bored prior to the ending, meaning the book as a whole was not bad. Missing were the little things that make a decent story better, and if horror is to be believable the little things really are needed – likable characters with thoughts that make sense, bridge the gaps, etc.

Granted this was John Saul's first book, published in 1977. Does that mean his later books will be better? I don't know, but I'm willing to try with the five other paperbacks I currently own (found in used book shops). Prior to this I've read only one other, “Nathaniel” and I cannot recall a thing. Hey, it was a long time ago. Next up from those I own will be his tenth book: ”The Unwanted” published in 1987.

I am sad people gave the book lower stars because of the ending, because in my opinion it fit really well with the story/legend/curse of the family.

5 stars for the terror and horror i felt.
1 star for my actual enjoyment lol

Crudo! Siniestro! Muy buen libro! Con un final que te deja con la boca abierta! Con páginas llenas de sangre , descuartizamientos ! Léanlo!

“I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.”
ttStephen King, Danse Macabre

DON'T READ THIS REVIEW IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE BOOK -- I WILL COMPLETELY WRECK IT FOR YOU WITH SPOILERS. SORRY, I CAN'T HELP MYSELF.

I read a couple of John Saul books when I was around 12. I don't remember much about them other than the undertone of forboding that completely permeated his books, and that I had to stop reading them because of it.

The book started off well enough -- pulled me right in and I felt like a 1970s horror movie was unspooling in my head (I was picturing Karen Black and Christopher George as the parents).

The story takes place in a small New England town, where no one locks their doors and there hasn't been a murder in almost 100 years. Hardly anyone from the outside ever moves to town. The small population looks after its own. (cue the ominous music...)

Our hapless adults are the Congers - the whole damn town was practically named after them, and they are a stereotypical old name no money family. They live in a huge old house on Conger Road, Jack is the editor of the local newspaper and Rose is unhappily (for Jack, anyway) out-earning her husband selling real estate. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure who she was selling to, as hardly anyone new ever moves there.

Anyway, Jack and Rose have two children. Elizabeth is 13 and the perfect daughter. She is beautiful, patient, kind, mature, obedient, and spends all of her time taking care of her younger sister Sarah. Sarah was perfectly fine until about a year before our story begins; one day she went for a walk in the woods with her father and has never been the same. He pounded the C-R-A-P out of her, almost killed her, and she hasn't spoken since. She goes to a "special" school and her father, who can't remember the incident at all, spends lots of time in the library of his big old house drinking. Needless to say, Rose and Jack don't rub along very nicely together - he can't get it up and she's pretty cranky about it. They both snipe at each other, drink lots and completely ignore their children. Rose feels inadequate when Elizabeth is around and barely speaks to her except to talk to her about Sarah, she's always worrying about Sarah and Jack - well, who cares what he thinks. Neither parent is sympathetic in the slightest. Then there's the old housekeeper Mrs. Whazhername. I'm not sure why she's in the book. She's supposed to have been around since Jack was a kid, but she doesn't do much but sleep in her chair and complain about the dirty laundry (from the girls running around the countryside in the middle of the night). She offers no insight into the family curse, their history or, well, anything. To top it all off she's a pretty crappy babysitter.

By chapter three it wasn't hard to tell who the baddie was going to be, and in case any of us hadn't figured it out yet there was even more heavy-handed foreshadowing, then some genuinely creepy, gut-clenching scary writing. This skipped along ominously for a while and then the bad child finds a skeleton in a cave hidden in the bluffs, then kills her cat, dresses it in a doll's outfit and has a tea party. Shortly after that, the bad child leads a perfectly nice little friend of hers to the cave, makes her join the tea party (and put the cat's head back on after she cuts it off in a fit of rage) and leaves her in the pit in the dark. All of this is witnessed by the other sister, who conveniently can't tell on her because she can't/won't speak.

Holy Christ, I thought to myself. I really read this as a kid? Where were my parents? What kind of librarian lets a kid check this book out??

Anyway, back to the fucked up stuff. The bad kid becomes even more unhinged while still fooling her idiot parents back at the house. She takes knives from the kitchen, tricks another child (this one an even younger little boy) into coming with her to the cave, and throws him down into the pit with the first kid. Another disgusting tea party follows. This time she rubs the putrid cat's corpse in the little boy's crotch after she makes him take off his clothes, she bashes at least one of them in the head with a rock and leaves them there again, in the dark.

At this point I'm totally squicked out and it has become crystal clear to me why I quit reading John Saul. His books are disturbing and gross - and in a way that is completely unnecessary.

I soldier on and slog through the hapless parents meeting with the equally clueless psychiatrist discussing Sarah's increasingly crazy behaviour - her clothes are covered with mud in the morning, she screams for no reason and she's acting weirder than usual. And what about those missing kids, they ask. Perhaps Sarah is behind the disappearances. (Oh for fuck's sakes, you idiots, those are her sister's clothes, not hers, why can't you see she's only upset around HER!?) Then the psychiatrist wants to know about Dad's amnesia surrounding his beating his daughter almost to death. Have you talked to anyone about this? Dad's response is, "No, why should I?" (I know the 70s were kinda loose compared to today's standards, but...)

Hmmm, what next. Oh! Creepy older sister talks cute neighbour boy (who is on to how crazy she is but won't live long enough to tell anyone) into trying to find the cave with her. It's a local legend, you see, about a Conger ancestor who killed his cat then jumped off the cliff, and his daughter went missing at the same time. The legend had it that she was in a cave on the bluff but no one had been able to find it. (Heh-heh chuckles the Cryptkeeper, who knew there was a tea party already in progress there!) Of course, they find it, with mute little sister bringing up the rear. Cute neighbour boy gets thrown in the pit and batshit crazy sister has a complete family for her tea party, until she gets angry and stabs the little boy to death, dismembers him completely and bashes the others on the head with rocks. (See what I mean about unnecessary ? That scene was disturbing enough without all the blood and chopping.) I tell you, if the Mad Hatter had been at this tea party he'd have run screaming for the hills.

After Sarah trudges out of the woods dragging a severed arm and covered with blood the bad parents have the good child committed, the bad child becomes an only child and everything is right with the world. Life returns to normal. The missing children are forgotten except by the old policeman who still checks the woods for them every year.

Now the book skips ahead 15 years. The good committed child is being released from the hospital on a weekend pass for the first time and going to visit her sister. The old policeman stops in at the Conger house to visit Elizabeth and we are treated to a HEE-YOOOGE info dump by both of them, letting us know that over the past 15 years Jack and Rose have died (together in a boating accident, and am I the only one who finds this just a little convenient?), Sarah hasn't been home since the day she brought the arm home, the cute neighbour boy's parents moved away and the other missing kids' parents are virtual pariahs. Elizabeth is selling the woods in order to keep paying for Sarah's care. The old cop is on the verge of retirement, and wants to take one final look for the cave before the woods are razed.

Well, we all know what's going to happen now -- the earth collapses on top of the cave, and the workmen and police discover the skeletons of the kids and the cat. Ooops, crazy Sarah is in trouble again, back to the hospital she goes, only after she starts screaming and her eyes roll back in her head and she goes mute. Elizabeth wanders around the house, grabs her old doll and her new kitty cat and walks out the front door. The camera (oops, sorry, I meant the author) pans us back to a diary sitting on a desk - an old diary with entries about "why is my daddy hurting me" and a cryptic quote "Suffer the children to come to me".

THE END.

What the heck?

I finished this book and thought to myself, self, this was stupid. And disturbing, and violent and gross. I used to read a lot of Stephen King as a kid and while his stuff sometimes scared the crap out of me, it never disturbed me on the level that John Saul did. Reading this book brought to mind the quote I posted at the top of this review. John Saul was definitely a write of the "gross-out" variety. Something about Saul's theme's bother me - probably the use of children (which bothered me even when I was little more than a child myself) would be the big thing, and IIRC they figure prominently in quite a few of his books. The disturbing gross out factor is another.

Or maybe I'm just getting old. The same way the Tilt-a-Whirl makes me upchuck when I used to be able to ride that thing all day, perhaps I just don't have the stomach for this type of horror anymore.

3 stars - before it got gross and disturbing, it was actually pretty good.

The book was okay throughout, then the last four chapters I hated. So many unanswered questions and left me wondering what the point was?

The setting made for a perfect eerie feeling. The small town vibe is something I’m familiar with personally, the location of the cave is thrilling to me to say the least. It makes me want to go explore to find that cave and go search inside.

The characters, I have a love-hate with. But I’m fairly certain that’s the point. It seems like the author wants you to have hatred and disgust while thinking of some of the characters, while also feeling sympathetic towards them at other times. It makes you question if that person even deserves those feelings from you. I’m talking about mainly Jack and Elizabeth. sometimes Jack’s secretary and sometimes Rose. The author definitely is capable of showing you multiple sides to people. The good and the ugly.

All the abuse going on in this book required me to read a not- so-horror book afterwards to lighten my mood. I’m thankful the book wasn’t overly heavy on that, there’s “just enough”. But when it’s there it makes me uncomfortable in my skin. I blame my empathy. But I still always go back for more.

The plot in the book I loved. I was interested the entire time. The main plot with the family curse at first had me scoffing, until you notice the subtle places he places information relevant to that. ( I.e. how Elizabeth’s footing would change in the woods when she was Elizabeth vs Beth. Or her voice .) he didn’t flat out say “and now Beth said this”. It was subtle and seemed more realistic instead if he said something more dramatic like “and then she started to glow and out of the glow she transformed to Beth”. I like how he did it and it made the whole family curse more real and interesting to me.
They mix was good with the side stories not being too much for me to forget the main plot as well. It has enough information for me to make me feel like I was a part of it all.





The only reason I didn’t give this book 5 stars is I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to have more from Sarah. Even if it was the ending chapters when she was more lucid. I’d love to have been in her thoughts a bit more. This poor girl I loved the entire time. But over all, definitely a book I loved. Possibly could reread in the future.

Recién me doy cuenta que no di una opinión sobre este libro.
Una historia llena de fantasmas , brujeria y posesiones , donde los villanos y las victimas son niños .
Aunque la lectura es un poco lenta , y la verdad por rato se hace muy intrascendente algunas circunstancias, mejora mucho con las escenas de violencia y con el final que es un poco predecible pero brutal.