12/5/02
Book
The Town - Bentley Little
Something unnatural is going on in the town of McGuane, Arizona. The return of Gregory Tomasov with his city family and his aged mother is heralded with a disorganised pattern of growing freakishness and bizarre deaths. His mother, superstitious and religious in equal measure, thinks that she knows what it going on but is afraid to be right. The old bathhouse in the back end of the property is inhabited by the shadow of something no longer really there, a hungry shadow that is tempting the kids. Gregory just wants to be at home again, but as soon as he begins to fit in, everything he gets involved in ends in disaster. The worst though is yet to come.
The Town is a fair novel. I found it to be highly derivative. The first fifty to sixty pages is strongly familiar as if I've read it years before the book was published. I can't name the book it reminds me of though. A lot of the later story is a rehashing of the back-story of the Amityville Horror. Still, it has several elements strongly rooted in Russian folklore that not only came across as new but also as engaging. The pacing throughout the book is good, and the dialog flows nicely. The settings are nicely visualised. There is a certain inherent life to the main characters and the other townsfolk. All in all The Town is not a bad horror, but nor, with its deeply unoriginal elements, is it a great one. Fair adequately describes it.
(
Thank you for reading my review.
Bob Male)
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