This isn't a book that makes me realise why I love horror fiction so much, but it is a good solid read that's alternately moving and pretty damned scary.
Abe and Dan are both young widowers who work together in upstate New York. For companionship, they fish together. When Dan hears about Dutchman's Creek, near a reservoir upstate, and the things to be found there other than fish, he persuades Abe to go there on their next trip.
After 60 something pages of good character development, the two men are told a story of the origin of Dutchman's Creek, mysterious happenings at the clearance of the villages in the path of the new reservoir, and a villainous man known as the Fisherman. This story takes up the next 200 pages of the narrative before returning us to Abe and Dan for the last 100 pages.
It's an interesting structure for the book, but could have been balanced slightly better. Parts of the story within the story could certainly have been trimmed. It did seem to go on for longer than it should have IMHO.
The story moves from personal grief to cosmic horror with links to old testament and earlier mythological monsters.
I found the Abe and Dan sections were better than the very long middle section. Abe's voice as narrator was affecting, and could hear the new York drawl in his voice as I read it. The whole book is slow burn and atmospheric horror. When things get scary, they genuinely do raise the pulse rate (mine at least) and some of the ideas and concepts on offer are pretty disturbing.
The only flaw is that the middle section does meander more than the creeks and rivers it describes in such gorgeous detail. On the strength of this I will definitely be reading more by this writer.
No comments:
Post a Comment