I don’t know where I got this Book Club edition; as it does not show up on any Good Book Hunting reports, I’ll assume that I inherited from my aunt who passed away 20 years ago whose few bookshelves were packed with 70s and 80s horror and thrillers. You know, in my Ebay peddling days, she came along to estate sales a time or two and tried the Ebay thing for a while as well–at least, she listed, sold, and shipped a few things from what she picked up, mostly the collectible statuary of the era. She did better than Pixie, who more frequently accompanied me, who collected items but didn’t generally get around to listing them on Ebay.
At any rate, I read Creature in 2019, and I thought it was okay. But this book? Absurd. Absurd. I did not like it.
So: A prodigal son is called back to his childhood home, Sea Oaks, as his mother is dying. So he brings his nuclear family to the island and its antebellum mansion off the coast of the southern United States. His mother is a harridan who has been hard on his sister who wanted to be a dancer but fell down the stairs and broke a hip which put off her dreams, which to be honest were as much her mother’s dreams. The old woman dies, and then the daughter goes crazy (again) and begins to kill everyone one-by-one. The wife. Her dance students. Her housekeeper. Her brother. And so on. Somehow, the fact that these deaths are piling up on Sea Oaks in a relatively short time (like a couple weeks) doesn’t draw any attention, and somehow, this middle-aged woman with a pronounced limp can get the drop on a whole bunch of people and can handle corpses like a professional coroner, and….
Oh, for Pete’s sake. I have recently dinged authors for having their plots too informed by video games; this book’s plotting seems ripped from contemporary (then) direct-to-video slasher films. Eesh, one of the first video cassettes we owned in 1985 was Alice, Sweet Alice, and this book is right on par with it.
I mean, Saul is an adequate writer. He spends a little too much time, perhaps, setting up the tropish Southern Gothic setting (the first hundred pages of the 300 page book are setting the scene, it seems). But.
Yeah, you know, I’ve often, at least in person, commented on how some writers of the past who are wildly successful in their time are forgotten now. When I was hitting the estate sales around the turn of the century, as the, what, Silent Generation and maybe Greatest Generation were cleaning out, I saw a hella lotta Frank Yerby novels. A lot of Harold Robbins novels. Probably my share of John Saul novels. But you don’t hear much about them now, and reading this book written and published in my lifetime, I can kind of see how it happens. Wildly popular, a product of its time, but not timeless in any sense.
I don’t know how many other Saul novels I might have floating around here; however, I can say that it will probably be another seven years before I get to one. Unless I decide I must read all the John Saul books right now like I sometimes do. But I hope not.
