The Policy

As someone who is having a heck of a hard time keeping up with insurance payments--house, car, health, life, etc...this book really brought out the paranoid delusional in me! I've followed Bentley Little for years and he's one of my favorites, but this book scares me. Insurance is what makes our world go around, and if you can't pay up, you pay the price! Super scary!

Little is the master of horrific satire aimed at the institutions of contemporary society {the university, the chain store, the homeowners' association, the post office} and here he takes on his biggest target yet--insurance companies. Unlike some other high-profile horror authors who've gone soft in their old age, Little is still up for anything. His work is chock full of graphic sex and violence...as well as believable sympathetic characters and thought-provoking social commentary. Another great novel by horror's vest writer.

That's what Bentley Little writes about. Seemingly innocuous things, people, places, we never thing twice about. Our mail carrier, the new superstore that's opening, a home owner's association in a gated community, the university in your hometown. And whatever you do, bad things are going to happen when you relocate or decide to move back home to where you grew up!The Policy deals with our need for insurance - plain and simple. It's something we all have. It's just *there*. Think nothing of it. Life, home owners', health, car and even renters' insurance. But, what if your insurance company went wrong? Terribly, sinisterly wrong? This is what happens to Hunt Jackson, who decided to move home to Tucson, AZ from L.A. after his marriage ends. At first things go well. He meets up with his childhood best friend. Even finds a new love. Has to take a job as a tree trimmer despite his job was in computers, but he doesn't mind. He likes his co-workers, just not Steve, their supervisor.Slowly, things start to go wrong with his insurance claims. And an eerie, enigmatic salesman always appears at the right time to sell you new insurance. His company's name? Simply The Insurance Company. But, what happens when you tell the salesman "no"? This is the plot of the The Privacy. Eventually, Hunt is joined by his co-workers and friends as they too begin to become victims of the salesman and the ever-growing demands he brings for new, different insurance coverage. Coverage for *everything*.It doesn't take the reader long to realize this insurance salesman is not quite human, if at all, nor are the others that work for The Insurance Company. How far does the company reach and how far back in time do they go?A must read for any Little fan. Personally, I have all his books. Keep him on your horror radar. And new readers will not be disappointed either.

Bentley Little is the best horror novelist out there today. He makes the average and mundane aspects of modern society like shopping, the mail system, schools, suburbia, etc. take on sinister dimensions like no other writer can. Over the last decade and a half he has consistently churned out a novel every year and in my opinion has produced the best horror fiction since 80's-era King and McCammon. For those of you who were dissapointed with last year's The Return, fret no more, Little is again in fine form here.Following a recent and nasty divorce, Hunt Jackson decides to leave California behind and settle back into Tucson AZ, the neighbourhood he grew up in. Once in Tucson, he moves into a rented home, finds himself a job trimming trees and reunites with Joel, his childhood pal. Hunt is also introduced through Joel and his wife to a young woman named Beth and the two hit it off immediately. After his messy divorce, things seem to be finally looking up for him. The first sign of trouble comes when Hunt discovers one day that one of the windows of his car has been cracked, an apparent act of vandalism. He calls his car insurance provider and is put through a unanimous male operator who takes down his information.The operator then asks Hunt for the approximate time of the incident. When Hunt is unable to give him a precise time, the operator becomes rude and impolite and starts singing in a twangy southern accent, "Half past a monkey's [tail], a quarter to his balls." Shocked beyond comprehension, Hunt hangs up the phone. This will be his first bizarre experience with insurance companies but certainly not his last. In the next few weeks, he and Beth(now living together) and others residents in the Tucson area are offered increasingly bizarre insurance coverage, at a deadly cost if refused. When Hunt refuses an agent's wrongful imprisonment insurance he finds himself arrested and kicked in jail for molesting a nine-year old girl, a crime he didn't commit. When Beth refuses the agent's dental insurance since she already has a plan through work, she finds herself with horrible steel-plated teeth. When a neighbourhood couple refuse the agent's earthquake insurance, they wake up one night to find the floor of their house shaking and soon after their entire home in a pile of rubble.Anyone who has already read some of Little's work will know him to be one of the more obviously liberal and left-leaning horror writers out there. The Policy has his usual philosophising on modern society, chain stores, class divisions, capitalism. Little's focus in this novel is especially on how privatization and deregulation facilitates large companies(such as insurance companies) being able to control more and more every aspect of our lives. As Little points out, almost everything of ours seems to need insurance: our teeth, our health, our cars, our homes, our lives.Little is not only a master of horror, but also a master comedian. The protagonist's first phone call to th

But then again, Hunt Jackson and his new wife and friends aren't plagued by a normal insurance agent. We're talking about a guy who suddenly walks out of your guest bedroom; a guy who seems to have a second personality hidden below his exterior smile...And he doesn't work for a normal insurance company. The Insurance Group offers some of the strangest insurance policies known to man; policies, in fact, that seem to be invented due to whatever your current situation in life is...And if you do not buy these policies, something will happen to make you change your mind.For Hunt, it is imprisonment as a child molester. For his wife, it is the removal of her teeth. For his friend, it is a life-threatening accident at work.And there seems to be not a thing they can do to stop it. Insurance, after all, is a necessity.Bentley Little has been known to satirize certain aspects of American life. "The Ignored," for example, talked about a man who was so ordinary he simply disappears; "The Association" talks about a home owner's association that takes things to the max. Here, it is insurance and insurance policies. And it is frightening.Little manages to take mediocre plots/characters and combine them into something that no one else--not even, ladies and gentelmen, Stephen King--could write. Little's novels do not challenge you to think; they scare you. That is what a good horror novel should do, I think.And Bentley Little's "The Policy" scares you. No doubt about it.