Pretty good thriller!

This is not really Saul's best work. For me, it had great potential but just didn't live up to it at all. If you're looking for some good Saul, read his earlier works.

**spoilerific**

I really wanted to like this John Saul southern / satanic horror. I really did. It had all the makings of a decent story. But on all fronts, it never quite got there. The Southern gothic creepiness . . . just didn't translate. The dark exotic of voodoo . . . didn't get enough focus and wasn't embedded well enough in the story. The looming horror of a family torn apart by satanic possession. Well . . . yeah, not quite.

All those elements were great. But they never hit their potential and the story bubbled along just under the surface. As if the author had a good idea, but was too distracted or busy with other things to give it the attention it deserved.

One real drawback . . . . very little actually happens in the story. There was great opportunity here to build a real horror, show a god-fearing community sent over the edge by a creeping, insidious violence. Again, however, it never gets there. Instead, we get some vague implications that something bad is happening, and a whole of really annoying dream sequences. The most sinister character in the story—the priest, who could have been made responsible for all kinds of mischief in the name of his God—turned out to be right all along, which is an awful cop-out (sure, the character might have been a red herring, but as it was pretty clear was was going on, there was no good reason for him to be so backwards and nasty, particularly if his position was going to end up being vindicated).

I'd also have to mention one glaring problem. Although the novel is fairly well-written—at least in terms of the fact that there is very little author intrusion and the stunted story flows—I would humbly suggest that most families where generations of wives write diaries in the pages of the family bible probably don't also have an omniscient third person to add notes explaining the bits the diarists couldn't have written. Okay, that was a pretty crap sentence. What I mean is that I was annoyed that there were sections in what was supposed to be a diary, which appeared to have been written by the author rather than by the long-dead diarists. Not much author intrusion in The Right Hand of Evil, as I said, but that one was glaring and annoying.

Like I said. I wanted to like it. The elements were there for a good story. But at the end of the day I just don't feel like John Saul could be bothered with it, and I'm a bit depressed that I did.

This was my first John Saul book. I will read more of his books. I really liked the character development. I liked how it tackled Alcoholism. Probably will check out the Blackstone Chronicles next.

The book scared me. Small review I know but not much more I can say.

This book was really hokey and had a lot of gratuitous violence. I can't figure out whether it was aimed at adults or teenagers.

For this being my second read of his, I still thoroughly enjoyed it. Intense and straight up old school creepy. I loved it!

I originally read this around 1999, when it was first published. I guess to some extent, it's inevitable that as you read a book, you will forever associate it with the time in your life in which you read it. So while my first misgiving about this book is in no way the fault of the author or the story itself, I'll always remember how trapped I felt reading this, as it was a slap in my face of how a "normal" family (on the outside, at least) should appear. Mom, Dad, brother who likes football, sister who is gentler and meeker, and baby sister. It was an eerie echo of my family at that time in my life, except I was anything BUT the stereotypical teenage boy who was heterosexual and into football. Sorry, no. So I had a chip on my shoulder about this story in the beginning, and I was reminded of that as I reread that. The family dynamic was very "plain Jane" for the 1990s and I get that's what the author was going for, in light of what happened next.

So, first, what I liked about this story. I mean, in the "creepy Southern American plantation manor house hiding generations of shocking family secrets" trope, it's all been done already, and there's nothing particularly new or earth-shattering about the way this one goes, either. But those stories are FUN, and creepy, and the story itself was engaging and I was always interested in what was going to happen next, which is more than I can say for many books I pick up with even greater enthusiasm than I did this one.

The annoying parts? Not a single one of these characters was actually likable. Now, I'm ALL one for "shades of grey" when it comes to good/bad characters. I love those kinds of stories much more than those with strictly good, and strictly evil characters. But this didn't work for me. You have your bigoted, xenophobic small town denizens; you have your stuffy, sanctimonious, and nasty clergy; you have a boring stick figure family, none of whom really have any redeeming qualities. Ted (the father) is a drunk who then gets into even bigger trouble; Janet (the mother) is a pushover with no backbone; Jared (the son) is a one-dimensional jock who turns really bad; Kim (the daughter) is basically a bare-bones sketch of a teenage girl with nothing that makes her stand out at all, and Molly (the baby) has zero purpose in the story other than to cry when something bad happens. I could complain about all the other characters too, but you get the picture.

Also, I just can't stand stories that do the whole "something really bad is happening right in front of the characters' eyes but they're too stupid to figure it out until the penultimate page in the book" thing.

It's dumb.

The next part doesn't contain spoilers as such, but I do talk about how the book ends (but not what the exact ending is.)

Demerit #1: one star deducted for the uselessness of the female characters. Yeah, this story is dated. I get that. And yeah, it was written 20 years ago. But I've read books fifty years older (hell, a hundred years older, really) which gave their female characters more of a backbone. Mother Janet does a huge amount of hand-wringing and very little action of any sort, and the few times she wants to try to do something, it takes 0.5 seconds to talk her out of it and send her back to being meek and mild. Daughter Kim is just as bad, just kind of floating through the bad circumstances in the book and moping about why her brother won't talk to her anymore but not doing anything about it. Both mother and daughter are present in the confrontation in the climax of the book and BOTH had a chance to step up and be a hero, and neither one did. They ended up just being support roles to Jared. That's utterly boring and offensive, especially in a story where generations of women had endured horrible things at the hands of the men of the family.

Demerit #2: one star deducted for the abrupt ending. I won't go into details, but we had this huge buildup to some confrontation which was over without a big bang and then the book just kind of ended, almost mid-sentence. I could not believe there was zero dénouement, no explanation, no closure. Some pretty final things happen at the end yet the characters are just left literally standing there, and that's that.

I'd have liked this story a lot more had there actually been a single vibrant character in it.

boring.
predictable.

A family moves into an old house of evil

I would give this 3 1/2 stars if I could, because I did like it a bit better than just 3, but not quite a 4-star read.

This is the first book by John Saul that I have read, and I'm glad that I did. It's a well-crafted look at a dark, and deeply disturbing family history, wrapped in mystery and some haunted house vibes.

Some of the story felt a little too contrived and some of the characters felt like they lacked depth, but overall, the book kept me engaged, kept me reading, and the parts covering addiction hit close to home and felt so spot on, that I forgive some of the weaker points in the book.

I will definitely be adding Saul to my reading list going forward.

This was a reread - had to have been 20 years or so. It still holds up as a great Saul book, but some of the details were a bit too intense for this old broad at this point in life. I think I am remembering why I stopped reading straight up horror all those years ago. Personal preference aside, it does hold up as a great psychological thriller, and that is the reason I picked up a few of his recently.

An old house will almost always draw me in, and this one is certainly no exception. Some of the storyline is just a bit over the top to me, but it is a solid story throughout.