The Tides

A series of sinister accidents occurs at The Tides, a nursing home where Rebecca Emig is both administrator and the daughter of one of the patients. Are the visions of Rebecca's father, Marshall, real or senile delusions? Are they linked to these accidents? And how will they change Rebecca's life and that of every resident of the home? Melanie Tem has been around for a long time. She's the winner of the Bram Stoker Award, wife to Steve Rasnick Tem, himself a very well-respected writer of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and she knows her craft. She writes a good, tight narrative in which nothing is wasted and every detail tells a larger story. And those details are blunt; this story, while not gory, is not for readers with delicate sensibilities. The subject matter - residents of a nursing home, mostly elderly, many suffering senile dementia - is something I find hard to deal with for personal reasons, but if that were not the case, I suspect I would still find it all very disturbing. Tem has done her time in social work, and the details here ring true. She is writing what she knows, and this gives the book a firm underpinning of truth. Perhaps that's the most disturbing element of all. If this were simply a wild and wooly horror novel, it would be easy to forget.As it is, this book will stay with you long after the storyline has ceased to creep you out. There is an almost unpleasant vividness to the characters which makes each twist all the more horrifying. This isn't about Freddie or Jason or any boogeyman, this is about what happens inside our heads when reality slips. And it's about the things that are, perhaps, just waiting on the sidelines for that moment. It's a well-balanced story about a man who has never forgotten or ceased to love his first wife, a selfish woman who married, had a child and then deserted her family. Even if the horror were only in Marshall Emig's mind, there is a terrible inevitability to the truths that are coming to the surface now that his defenses are being destroyed by age. Rebecca does not know that Billie, her father's second wife, is not her biological mother. She doesn't know that Marshall was ever married to a woman named Faye, and she certainly doesn't know the story behind that marriage. This would be horror enough for some people, and when Tem offers this plot as a layer in the larger story, the effect is both sad and shocking.As with most horror novels, telling too much spoils the suspense, so let me just say that if you like good, tight horror, rising tension and some good, old-fashioned creepiness in what is to my way of thinking one of the most humane narratives I've ever encountered in this genre, then "The Tides" is a book you will want to read.

This is much more than a simple ghost story... Is Faye a woman or a demon? Why is she coming back to destroy everyone at the secluded Tides? You'll have to find for yourself, but be warned, this little book won't let you go till the nerve-shattering climax, and then it'll come back in your dreams, again and again and again...