Sometimes these are little gems, real works of good fiction hidden behind those bloodstained pictures. Sometimes, as those who read this blog on a regular basis will know (in fact most of the time) I finish them through brute determination not to let it beat me and the best thing about it is that it's short.
Richard Salem is actually a pseudonym for a historical writer called Graham Shelby, who has several books to his name (but his wikipedia entry is nothing more than a list of these books so it seems unlikely he has any kind of prominence in the field) so this isn't afirst novel, we can hope that he actually knows how to string sentences together.
And he can to a point. This is never less than readable. However it's never much more than readable either, and the storyline, despite a promising premise, is utter nonsense by the end of the book. This review will be a little spoilerific as the main letdown on this book is the solution to the mysteries set up in the first two thirds.
The book follows Clay and Holly Ryan, a successful rich couple from New York who decide to relocate to the country after Holly is attacked on her way home by two masked men. After a mysterious phone call tipping them off about a small town called Credence, they go for a visit and quickly buy themselves a home in this apparent paradise.
Their first friends are a successful author who lives down the road and his wife, Willis and Karen. Willis is a megahunk and Karen his idolising wife. They've not lived in the town long. They moved there after Karen was attacked by two masked men and they decided to move to the country. A mysterious phone call told them to check out Credence, etc etc etc.
First rule of buying a new house. Never do it somehwere that only has one bridge in and out of town. There will be dark secrets and you'll be trapped. Clearly, the two couples in this book have never heard this advice.
The town itself is almost perfect on the surface but there are strange things happening. Where are the old people? And where are the children - in a fair sized small town, there are only six children and all under the age of 8? Why is everyone so scared of the smallest injury to the point that everyone uses plastic glasses and even the butter knives have been blunted to the point they can't cut through a scone?
We also see a few of the locals spew black oily blood from their eyes, nose and mouth as they die horribly for no pasrticular reason other than the plot needs something more.
What looked like reasonably good foreshadowing early on in the book turns into quite repetitive spoonfeeding later on. There really isn't much more to the mystery of what's happening than those few questions and, coming in at 227 pages, it's not that much of a hook to build your tension on.
Karen is apparently bitten by a spider at the town fete and taken to the local doctor's office where she's kept overnight. A few months later she finds out that she's pregnant. She has no idea who the father could be since her megahunk husband is apparently completely impotent. This is where the real problems start in the plot.
You see, there are no old people in the town because the doctor has been testing an experimental serum on the townsfolk. This keeps them younger than their years but makes them extremely haemophiliac and apparently makes the women infertile. It also causes them occasionally to spontaneously erupt thick oily blood from every orifice and die horribly for no particular reason.
The doctor has lured our two couples to the town because he needs the "New Blood" of the title. His devious plot is to impregnate healthy, non-setrum infected women with men in the town's sperm to see if they can produce... something or other. I was starting to not care much by this point.
The biggest problem is that his method of impregnating poor Karen was to drug her with a dart gun and let just one of the townsfolk have a ride on her, once, after which she was automatically pregnant. Becasue we all know every woman automatically becomes pregnant after one unprotected session. It was such a successful technique that he was about to try it with Holly in the closing chapters, despite also trying to murder her husband.
That and other revelations in the final chapters, including the doctor's trrue identity, managed to completely lose any of the early promise this book might have had. There was actually a reasonably effective action sequence near the end of the book, but the explanations just killed the plot deader than any of the earlier vistims of the blood eruptions.
There is also a serious need for a copy editor in a few places. At one point he has Holly and Ryan discussing the questions listed earlier and how odd that both women had been attacked etc. On the next page we have the following quote... "It didn't occur to them that it was more than just coincidence, the four of them being here in this West Virginia town". They'd literally just spent three pages discussing the attacks, with Holly described as disturbed by the similarities.
In total, it's better than a lot of these books with these covers, but not by that much. I didn't struggle to finish it. I didn't put it down thinking "Will I ever learn?". That is the highest praise I can give it.
This book is available on Amazon but will set you back in the region of £15-£20 for some reason. I peeled a 50p sticker from the front of this before I took the picture. It looks like I could make a profit if I chose to sell it.
The previous owner of this book apparently only made it to the end of chapter 18, as I found a post-it note stuck to the page with the word Can Opener written on it at that point. I'm assuming it was a bookmark of sorts.
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