When will I learn?
Sadly, this book does not quite live up to that cover.
It opens well enough. Susan Benson's daughter, Jenna, fails to return home from school. By the time her husband Eddie gets home from working abroad a few days later, she's found out that Jenna has moved in with a local cult and is begging on the streets for them.
It's up to Eddie and the parents of the other children taken by the mysterious cult leader to try to get their children back.
This is easier said than done since Kheim, the cult leader, has mysterious powers which he uses to kill the parents off one by one, until only Eddie and Susan are left.
There's a lot of potential in a story like that. It's a shame this book doesn't deliver on it.
The main problem is that it's too fast paced. It jumps from scene to apparently unrelated scene with wild abandon. It's like reading a particularly jump-cutty Michael Bay film without the explosions. I kept thinking I'd skipped a page and going back to check. Some of these jumps miss out vastly important detail - for example, when Eddie and two of the shreddies witness the first murder from a distance (where a scarecrow beats a man to death with an iron bar) and then they enter the house where it happened and phone the police, we are not advised why the three of them weren't locked up and what they told the police had happened....
In the one sequence where it does settle down and concentrate on something for more than a handful of pages, it's actually quite good. Unfortunately, having 20-30 good pages isn't enough to save a novel.
There are major flaws in the plotting too. Eddie is offered his dream job on a film in Africa. He goes to the meeting where he's offered this job before he goes to see someone about his missing(ish) daughter. When he turns the job down, tells them he needs a few more weeeks to try to get his daughter back, the book actually has the exec offering him the job say "Before you hang up, you bastard, tell me something. Is that kid of yours worth it?" I can't remember a less believable line in any book I've read.
The supporting cast do very little supporting. His wife virtually disappears from the story after the first chapter, just popping in for a half a page here and there. Eddie's son actually does disappear, he only makes one more appearance after chapter one, for about five lines.
We never learn what exactly is happening to Jenna. From all appearances she's entirely safe in Kheim's care, well fed and watered and not mistreated. She's seen from a distance a few times and pops up in the last chapter for a few pages. There's never any real tension, no race against time for her to be rescued. There's also no satisfactory explanation as to why the authorities allow Kheim to keep all the children with him when the parents complain that they've run away and they want them back.
We never particularly learn enough about the shreddies to care about them before they're offed. They all die offscreen as well which feels wrong.
The only onscreen violence involves cats. One particularly bad jump cut very close to the end gives a five page description of a rat hunt before reaching the point and returning to the actual story. The author also clearly has never watched cats killing rats/mice. He describes one cat as picking up a dead rat in its mouth and another in one of it's paws and running off. When did cats gain the oppsable thumb required for that?
The characters seem very accepting of the most ludicrous stretches of reality. Eddie just accepts the (very silly in places) supernatural elements with barely a WTF. His acceptance so quickly (and his wife's on one of her rare forays back into the narrative) does not assist this particular reader with my own suspension of disbelief.
Apparently Hallahan won a couple of awards for his writing, and one of his books was described by the New York Times as one of the scariest books ever written. I have to assume that this book was a misfire if that is the case. I'll need some heavy duty persuasion before I pick up another book by this writer though.
This is available on kindle should you wish to experience the deathless prose for yourself. Physical copies appear to be hard to come by online.
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