Number 72- A Child Alone With Strangers- Philip Fracassi

 

My 3rd Fracassi novel, and I think the technical term for this one is "A bit of a chonker". This was large format, small print and still 600 plus pages.

It's lucky the man can write. :)

It all starts very Dead-Zone-y when Henry Thorne, the child of the title is involved in a near fatal incident and wakes with the power to read the minds of the people around him.

Unfortunately, a group of criminals decides that the insurance payout his family receives is a good reason to kidnap him and demand a huge ransom.

Even more unfortunately (for them), the remote house they hold him in is home to a creature that can and will threaten their lives. A creature with many strange abilities, including the ability to communicate with young Henry. 

This is by turns gruesome, funny, deeply disturbing and emotionally damaging.

It's not a perfect novel. Fracassi needs to decide if Henry is chubby or skinny.  He's referred to as both several times in his sojourn in the farmhouse. There are several places where I had to reread sentences because they were written with a subject/object confusion, which was a little annoying. 

However these were minor glitches, and for only a handful of sentences that the editor should have picked up on in a book this size, it really doesn't affect the impact this book has.

I think I prefer Boys in the Valley to this one, but this is still an easy 7/10. Maybe higher. It's well over a week since I finished it and some of the images are still seared in my brain.