Afterlife: 6

This is a relatively short book and seemed to appear without any great publicity (unlike his more recent Priest Of Blood and Mordred). However, as good as all his books are, this, in my opinion, is Douglas Clegg writing at his best. The story of a wife whose husband is murdered is engrossing from the start. Mix into this the well-written journey of her gradual break down, the fact that her husband was not who she thought he was and, for that matter, neither was the murder, and you have an excellent story told by an excellent storyteller. The twists and turns will keep you guessing right until the end. I highly recommend this book, both to Douglas Clegg fans and those who have never read anything by this very talented author.

Douglas Clegg is a first-class writer of modern horror fiction, and AFTERLIFE is a worthy addtion to his body of work. If you've never read Clegg before, AFTERLIFE is a great book to start with. The energy of the prose and the story's unflagging momentum will keep you from being able to set the book down. And if you find yourself sprinting through AFTERLIFE, still hungry for more, make sure to pick up THE HOUR BEFORE DARK, which is probably Clegg's most richly conceived and executed novel to date.

Douglas Clegg is without-a-doubt one of the best horror authors out there: his novels are original and deeply captivating with superb character study. His new one is no diferent, a perfect psychological horror story that will give you the creeps. Julie Hutchinson's husband gets brutally murdered and from that point on, her life becomes one mysterious nightmare. After his body disappears from the police morgue, Julie starts to reveal secrets about her husband's past, which involved a top-secret government project: Daylight, where experiments on young children with ESP took place. With help from her mother, daughter, stepson, her husband's ex-wife and Michael Diamond, a TV psychic, Julie finds that things are not as they seem as she enters the world of reincarnation and psychic phenomena. Dark, disturbing, sad, full of passion rarely seen in horror novels, this is a great winner from a great author.

As another reviewer wrote, Clegg creates a great web of paranoia in Afterlife, leading you not to trust anyone or anything. This is a lean and mean book, and I read it all in one sitting. Julie Hutchinson, the main character, is having a lot of trouble dealing with the brutal and mysterious murder of her husband, Jeff. Now she's having erotic nightmares and hideous hallucinations. All of this leads to her to work with Jeff's ex-wife and a popular TV psychic to figure out a tangled web of secrets in her past. What's this all have to do with Project Daylight? Well, I can't tell you that, it would ruin the fun of the book! Great stuff, and you can't go wrong with Douglas Clegg, the master of terror!

If you haven't read a Clegg novel yet, now is your chance to do so. Not only is Afterlife a great horror story, it also stands as one of Clegg's most suspenseful tale yet. This one has all the elements of a classic in the making. Julie's life is turned upside down when she learns that her husband was brutally murdered. She is left alone to grieve with her young daughter and her strange teenage stepson. Everyone around her wants to help; her sister Melanie, her mother, her friends, her therapist... Yet no one is able to help her forget the pane of her husband's death. But as she tries her best to return to her normal life, strange things happen to Julie. She dreams of strange, erotic thoughts. Her husband's body disappears from the morgue. She she learns about her husband's past, a past he had kept hidden from her all these years. A stranger enters her home at night and disappears. As Julie searches for the truth, she feels the constant threat of being watched, and the nightmares become more and more real. The only person she can trust is a strange television psychic who will try to help her through this ordeal. Or is he? Clegg creates a great webb of paranoia that prevents you from trusting any of the characters except Julie. And even Julie is a flawed character. Sometimes, you root for her, and sometimes you just want to slap her in the face to make her open her eyes and accept the truth for what it truly is. Such a character only turns a very good story into an even greater one. This story is similar to some of the genre's best. Rosemary's Baby comes to mind. Like Levin's amazing tale of suspense, Clegg creates a suspenseful tale that never lets go of the grip it has on you. You can't help yourself; you just want to keep on turning the pages way past your bedtime. And what Clegg does best is write about the grief Julie is going through. Some of the scenes early on in the story are just heart wrenching. Douglas Clegg is fast becoming one of the greatest new voice in horror fiction, and Afterlife is the perfect example of his amazing talent. Suspenseful, full of horror, and vastly entertaining, Afterlife might very well be the best horror novel of the year!