Nightshade

at first i thought: ok. a bit slow. not much descriptions, but ok. heh! actually, JS was setting the stage to make the psychological horror greater. and he was waiting for the descriptions untill later, wanting development first. when the descriptions came, they were great. i liked the plot. enjoyed the suspence. enjoyed the ending too. the psychological horror was really good. most horror writer fails when it comes to The Family. it gets tedious, irrelevant, even mushy. JS makes the family his strength here. the sudden insecurity. the unsaid. the tension. The Family makes the story better, which i find uncommon. a mother with alzheimer burns down her house. she comes to live with a family of her daughter the husband and the son (sort of). she insists on witing for her other dead daugher and arrange a room for her. after a while, mysterious things occur. the tension grows. disaster strikes. i cannot say more without giving away something. let's just say that there is an act of violence treathening to destroy, some strange sightings. this was plot-driven and loaded with suspence, and i found it to be great just one note: DON'T READ THE EPILOGUE. the ending is good enough. THE EPILOGUE IS AWFUL. it's a robert bloch-cliche of the worst kind. you don't NEED to read it. it tells you nothing. it's just stupid and awful to read. tear it out or ignore it. i'm serious. if you read it, you WILL be disappointed, i GUARANTEE it.

With Nightshade, John Saul gets back to what he does best, giving birth to a story almost as chilling and compelling as his premier masterpiece Suffer the Children. Forget biomedical experimentation, genetic manipulation, and all of the other external forces that often lie behind Saul's plots; this book marks a return to good old-fashioned madness and horror. Of course, we start with the perfect all-American family-Joan Moore Hapgood, her son Matt, and husband Bill who has always thought of his step-son as his own true son. Suddenly, Joan's grim, bitter, nasty, Alzheimer's-afflicted mother almost burns her own house down and comes to live with the Hapgoods. Emily Moore is obsessed with her daughter Cynthia, the perfect child whom she refuses to believe is never coming back home to her. Immediately, Matt's nights are filled with the horrible nightmares he had not experienced since leaving Emily's home as a child to move to the home of his new step-father. Watching his mother-in-law tearing his happy family apart, Bill simply leaves his wife and son to the misery of Emily's company. A series of tragedies unfolds, affecting not only the family but the entire close-knit community. Matt changes into a haunted young man, seeing suspicion and dislike pointed toward him from everyone he has ever cared about. Misery turns to the ultimate tragedy, and the reader is left to ponder just who is responsible. Is it Matt, who looks guilty in the eyes of everyone else? Is it his aunt Cynthia, whose presence comes to permeate the house and exert an unhealthy influence on Matt's life in spite of the fact that she is long-dead? Or could it be someone or something else?Saul hits a home run with this novel. Whatever suspicions the reader entertains, the truth is never truly known in spite of its foreshadowing, not until the ultimate conclusion. As the plot progresses, Saul slowly but surely increases the tension, drawing the reader further and further into this fascinating story. One is never really sure what to think about the action as it unfolds. Even when the true source of the horror is revealed a couple of chapters before the end, the heightened sense of expectation and worry for the characters so well-presented and seemingly real continues unabated. To some degree this is a ghost story, but it is better described as psychological horror. Madness makes for a much more compelling villain than outside entities, and that is why Nightshade stands as one of John Saul's most compelling novels. Filled with insanity, ghostly impressions, terror, murder, a bit of blood and gore, and a surprise or two at the end, Nightshade reveals the true talent that resides in the mind of an author too little appreciated by the horror community.

I was captivated by this book from the beginning. Though the story was a little farfetched, the writing and character descriptions were incredible. Was it really a ghost or was everyone just crazy? You'll just have to read this and find out.

I haven't read a John Saul novel in at least ten years. I picked up "NIGHTSHADE" at the library, and I have to tell you this is a thoroughly enjoyable book. It's well thought through, the plot is delicately planned, leading the reader this way and that. IT's a whodunit, a mystery, a family novel, a thriller, a detective story, but most of all a true ghost story. It had my heart pounding at times, and I had to read the final 200 pages well into the night to get to the end or I wouldn't have been able to sleep. Well done, Mr. Saul. Well done indeed.

Joan Hapgood has a cozy, comfortable life at Hapgood Farm withher husband Bill and son Matt (from a previous relationship). That is, until the day her aging and increasingly senile mother, Emily Moore, sets her house on fire and Joan brings her to live at the farm. Emily is the mother from hell and makes life [extremely] intolerable for Joan's family. .... The psychological suspense is unrelenting as John Saul leads the reader through a tangle of fractured relationships, unearthly jealousy, repercussions of child abuse, fragile egos, and injured psyches held together with blood revenge. It becomes pretty clear in the last quarter of the book what's going on, but the ending will still sucker-punch you. There aren't many books I feel compelled to finish the same day I start them. This was one of them.