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Women in Horror Month: Book Review: Fractured Tide by Leslie Lutz

cover art for Fractured Tide by Leslie Lutz

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Fractured Tide by Leslie Lutz

Blink, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-0310770107

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Seventeen-year-old Sia is essential in her mother’s business of chartering trips for tourists wanting to scuba dive. A newbie scuba diver she has been assigned to help navigate a shipwreck is lost, and in her search for him, she senses an underwater threat. When she finds and retrieves her charge, it is too late.  Her mother calls another charter boat, full of high school students, to take Sia, her brother Felix, and the other passengers back.  Just as they’re moving to the second boat, the engines of both boats die, and they are cut off from any radio or cell phone contact, unable to contact the Coast Guard, and running out of water in the middle of the ocean. Then the creature Sia sensed in the shipwreck rises and uses its deadly appendages to sweep everyone over the side and destroy the boats. Sia, Felix and two of the students from the second charter, the only survivors, wash up on a desolate island with almost no food or water, trapped there by the giant sea monster blocking their escape. Sia and the other survivors are pretty well-developed, but not especially likable or cooperative given that if they can’t work together they are probably all going to die.

At first this looked like a straightforward killer animal story, but then it morphed into a survival narrative with science-fictional elements as well (it’s been compared to Lost). Yet there were a lot of things that didn’t make sense for any of those kinds of stories. The creature didn’t discriminate in its destruction of the boats, so it’s odd that the few people Sia has some kind of relationship with (her brother, the boy she thinks is cute, and his ex-girlfriend) are the only survivors. Sia is telling the story in a series of diary entries that she starts writing to her father, who is in prison, in a notebook she discovers shortly after washing up on the island (the story occasionally switches from first to second person as she directly addresses him, which can be confusing) and, in addition to being trapped on the island geographically, and by a killer sea monster, the survivors also seem to be trapped in time. Is this all going on in Sia’s head, or some of it, or is it all really happening? It was confusing, and not at all what I expected.

The parts with the sea creature were terrifying, as were the descriptions of running out of water or getting lost in the dark while scuba diving, and the effects of time repeating on all the characters and their actions took the story into the realm of the bizarre and hallucinatory by the end, but the story didn’t flow naturally– it really was a fractured narrative– and that detracted from my ability to really sink into the story. I’m not sure what I really think of how it worked, but I did love the author’s vivid imagination and description of the thrill and exhiliration Sia felt scuba diving, even in the most dangerous places, under the sea, and the author’s examination of what the thoughts might be of a teen in a tricky family situation with an incarcerated parent. Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Posted on February 5, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: Dear Laura by Gemma Amor

Dear Laura by Gemma Amor

Self published, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-797875-7-12

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

There are a lot of horrors in modern reality that don’t require monsters and boogeymen.   When combined, child abduction and fear of the unknown are two of the most effective ones.  In Gemma Amor’s quick 120 page novella, she uses them well.  This is a fast story with no drag between the pages, although the minimalist style she writes with may be off-putting to readers who prefer heavily developed stories.   Those who get squeamish about child abduction and murder in their fiction may want to look elsewhere, although there are no gory details.

 

Laura is a 14-year-old girl, who has the misfortune to leave her best friend and first boyfriend, Bobby,  alone at the bus stop for five minutes.  She returns to see him violating the #1 rule for kids: don’t ever get in a van with a stranger.  The van leaves, and that’s the last anyone ever hears from Bobby.  It’s not the last Laura hears, though.  On her birthday, she receives her first letter from ‘X,’ who claims to have taken Bobby.   Thus begins a bizarre game of quid pro quo, where X reveals a little more of Bobby’s fate with each yearly letter, as long as Laura leaves a personal object he requests at a specified location.  Some of the objects are mundane, and some require a personal and painful sacrifice of a physical nature from Laura.  This continues for decades, until the story resolves in the final few pages.

 

The story is told in the third person, and only from the point of view of the protagonist, it never shifts away from Laura.  The narration throughout Dear Laura is a very stripped-down, bare bones type of writing.  There is little time given to description in this book, and the backstory to the characters is essentially non-existent.  Dialogue?  Forget about it, there’s only ~10-15 lines of dialogue scattered throughout Dear Laura‘s 117 pages.  This is very straightforward writing: it tells what is happening, and doesn’t elaborate on anything.  Does the simplistic style weaken the writing?  No, it doesn’t.  Considering the bleakness of the subject matter, the basic style that author Amor uses lends to the curiously odd appeal.   People always seem to want answers to everything in life, and when people read books, they don’t want to just know what the villain did; they want to know WHY he did it.  Amor doesn’t waste time elaborating on such niceties, as they would get in the way and slow down the story.  That’s why her sparse writing style really shines with the novella’s subject matter. Sure the reader will have more questions than answers at the end of the story, but often, that’s what life is like anyhow.  Considering how often people in this world do evil things for no particular reason, the overall lack of explanation for actions of certain characters in Dear Laura make it all the more interesting…and realistic.

 

For readers that want an interesting, quick-paced story with no wasted time, Dear Laura should land right in their wheelhouse.  Most readers should find this appealing, the only exceptions being people who require densely layered stories and no plot holes.  Recommended.

 

Contains: violence, child abduction

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

 

 

Editor’s note: Dear Laura was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a First Novel.

 

Posted on April 7, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: The Institute by Stephen King

The Institute, by Stephen King

Scribner, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-9821-1056-7

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

The Institute is entry number fiftysomething in the catalogue of He Who Cannot Stop Writing, better known as Stephen King.  As he has been wont to do since 2010’s Full Dark, No Stars, King continues to mine the vein of psychological horror, finding true evil in the inhuman actions that normal, rational human beings foist on each other.  King doesn’t need vampires, hotels with a mind of their own or undead children with scalpels to do so: he finds plenty of ugliness with the insanity of everyday people.  The Institute isn’t on the level of his unholy trinity of The Shining, The Stand,  and ‘Salem’s Lot, but it’s still a very good read, and one that would be considered outstanding for any other author.  It’s clear that over 40 years into his career, King still has an iron grip on his claim to being America’s best writer, and he isn’t likely to relinquish the throne anytime soon.

The first 40 pages consist of following Tim Jamieson, an ex-cop drifting through life, who  winds up in the tiny hick town of Dupray, South Carolina and takes a King-created job as a night knocker, someone who walks the town from dusk till dawn, checking business doors and keeping an eye out for trouble.  The story stays here just long enough to get the scenario set and characters developed, then  jumps to Minnesota, with a completely different thread and set of characters.  It’s a testament to King’s skill that he’s able to do this.  He creates interest in an ordinary situation and location, gets it all developed, and then shifts gears to something completely unrelated, but no less interesting.  Phase 2 focuses on Luke Ellis, a child genius. who at the age of 12 is taking the entrance exams to MIT, the country’s most famous genius farm.  Luke is kidnapped and his parents killed one night, and he wakes up in a lockdown hospital/research unit in northern Maine known as The Institute.  Luke and the other children are subjected to various tests, beatings and tortures, as their captors seek to exploit extra-sensory abilities that most of the kids didn’t even know they had.  Of course, their handlers have their own nefarious reasons for their actions.  Eventually, the Maine and South Carolina threads tie together, and the story barrels through a thrilling conclusion.

As often happens with King, this one is yet ANOTHER page turner that is hard to put down.  A great deal of King’s skill lies in making any character at all seem interesting and worth the reader getting emotionally attached to.  Even the minor characters, like security guards and homeless people are completely developed, and you want to know what happens to them, no matter how small their role in the story.  The dialogue is perfect, whether the characters are southerners or New Englanders.  King clearly does his research, and gets all the little nuances and mannerisms perfect when the characters are conversing or taking actions.  The other area where he shines, as always, is in creating settings that make perfect sense, down to the last detail.  Everything fits, whether it’s detailing an escape plan or describing the methods used to physically and mentally abuse children.  He never leaves room for unbelievability, it all seems completely plausible.  King’s unequaled skill at all of the above is the main reason he’s been on top of the mountain for so long.  Of course, none of this matters unless the story is exciting, and it is.  It’s a fast burn of a story, and maintains a quick clip through its 500 plus pages.  There are no sections that drag, it all flies fast and keeps you turning pages.

The Institute is yet another winner from the author with the most consistent track record of excellence in American literary history.  If you’re a King fan, you’ll like it, and non-fans would also be likely to enjoy this one.

Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

 

 

 

Posted on January 18, 2020 by , Reply
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