You Come When I Call You

I borrowed this book from a friend, having never heard of Clegg or read anything by him. You Come When I Call You seemed like a strange name for a horror novel, and I guess that got me intrigued a bit.I loved this book. It is a deep, rich story about some kids who grow up in intolerable circumstances and becomes influenced and possessed by a demonic presence. As they grow older and separate, the presence within them goes dormant, but comes back with a vengeance nearly twenty years after the fact.Probably what got me most about this book was the fact that each character had a real reason to do and live like they did. The horror becomes overwhelming mainly because you know each of them so well.So I went and bought the book as a keeper, something that I don't always do. You come when I call You was a really cool find and I think anyone who likes horror fiction will dig it.My other recommendations in horror are Graham Joyce, Bentley Little, Stephen King, Poppy Z. Brite, Clive Barker, and Tom Piccirilli. I put Clegg's book with the best of them. It's not an easy read if you want to know the truth. This book is very intelligent and much like a puzzle. I think that's what also makes it work best. I got involved in it.

I first discovered Douglas Clegg's writing back in '95, when I bought a copy of THE CHILDREN'S HOUR (a book that desperately needs to return to print!) at the local independent bookstore. To say I was blown away by THE CHILDREN'S HOUR is an understatement. It was, in my opinion, the best horror novel of the 90's, with it's complex, moving story of friends confronting a timeless evil in both their past and in the present.It's perhaps the most powerful sub-genre in horror fiction: a sort of variation on the coming-of-age stories of mainstream fiction, where a group of young people fight evil and later must do so again as adults. Stephen King used this theme to create his masterpiece, IT.But no other horror writer handles this subject as well as Clegg. He knows the deep hold the past has on us all. And he understands that, no matter how hard we insist the past is behind us, we all, like Lot's wife, eventually look back.Clegg returned to this territory with fresh and surprising results in THE HALLOWEEN MAN. And in YOU COME WHEN I CALL YOU, he takes a story of past evil encroaching on the present and creates a roaring powerhouse of a novel.With it's narrative slipping seamlessly between past and present, Clegg's dynamic and evocative prose (he's equally adept at describing the stark beauty of a desert landscape or a horrific demonic manifestation) and dead-on characterizations -- this is the stuff of good writing in any genre. If there's such a thing as the great American horror novel, YOU COME WHEN I CALL YOU may well be it. I have seldom been this affected by a work of fiction; the novel and its characters are in my heart and mind now as surely as they were in Clegg's when he was writing it.This one's destined to become one of the classics of the genre. And if you're new to Clegg's writing, I can't think of a better place to start.

This is my second Douglas Clegg book. I recently read his short story collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, and was sufficiently impressed with his writing to want to seek out one of his novels. Now that I've read one, I think I'm going to have to go out and buy everything else he's written. I've been a big fan of the horror genre since I read Stephen King's Pet Sematary when I was eleven. A list of my favorite authors would have to include King, Peter Straub, Ray Bradbury, Robert R. McCammon, Clive Barker, Dan Simmons, T.E.D. Klein, Dean Koontz, Joe R. Lansdale, and now Douglas Clegg.I decided to read You Come When I Call You because it had just been published, and because I had read reviews comparing it to Straub's Ghost Story and King's It (two of my all-time favorites). Having now read the book in question, I'd have to say that it's not as good as either of those, but it's still a hell of a good read, and still worthy of five stars. (Another book that I was reminded of while reading it was Stinger by Robert R. McCammon).In You Come When I Call You, Clegg tells a story of childhood friends reunited in the present by a shared experience in their past--an experience so visceral and unrelenting that it continues to live on in their hearts and in their tormented waking dreams. The novel is divided into five parts which alternate between the story of Peter, Alison, and Charlie's last summer of childhood in the desert town of Palmetto, California, 1980 and the fallout of that summer in the present day. This technique of alternating between the characters as adults and children is probably the novel's strongest similarity to It. It's a great narrative device, because I found that reading about the characters' pasts made me want to know more about their futures and vice versa. One of Clegg's themes in the book is how good and evil aren't opposite forces, but rather parts of the same whole. He seems to be saying the same about the past and the present. The novel is also similar in its structure to Bram Stoker's Dracula. The narrative is woven together from a bunch of disparate sources: journal entries, taped interviews, and third person narration. In the beginning, I found this a little distracting. I felt that I didn't know enough about the characters and had a hard time relating to them as a result. But once I was on page 60 or 70, I felt the various forms of narrative had gelled together into a cohesive whole. From that point on, I just couldn't put the book down.The novel's similarity to Ghost Story is mainly one of plot: there's a group of friends haunted by an event they took part in in their youth, having to do with a beautiful young woman who is more than she at first appears to be. I didn't feel that Clegg's style was very similar to Straub's. It's more visceral and gut-level, and probably less elegant (though I don't mean that as a put-down). Straub is one of my favorite stylists.

This book grabbed me from page one and wouldn't let go. My only complaint was that I wasn't on vacation when I read this (well, okay, I wanted it to be longer too). I was immediately swept away by the characters and their situations. The settings--switching from 1980 to the present and back and forth again over the course of the narrative--didn't bog the reading experience down the way I thought it would. It only served to keep me interested in reading further. For example: finding out more about Wendy. Clegg does a fine job of teasing you with this character, making you want to know about her and then the setting shifts and you are back in the present and you are hearing things about her in the past tense from other characters. This all continues to build until the climax, which was extremely satisfying for me as a reader. I've read elsewhere that Clegg indicated he had cut two hundred pages or so from this final version; personally, I wouldn't have minded if this wasn't cut because I was really into the characters and the story so much. Maybe some time down the line their will be the "definitive edition".

With the release of You Come When I Call You, Douglas Clegg demonstrates clearly and without any doubt that he is one of the best horror writers in the business. The epic tale brings the reader into a world where nightmare and reality freely mix-and sometimes neither the characters nor the reader are quite sure which is which. The story, which takes place over a twenty-year period, is written in a style that is best described as a spiral. Clegg begins by sporadically revealing bits and pieces of the tale to the reader-some of the information from today, some from twenty years ago-developing the characters and story with each chapter, gradually adding new details, drawing the reader in, until everything becomes clear in the final pages. Although this nonlinear method of storytelling may be disconcerting to some readers, it actually serves as an extremely clever tool for holding the reader's interest and maintaining the suspense of the story.The novel starts in the small desert town of Palmetto-the kind of town where everyone knows everyone else and not much happens on a day to day basis. One by one several of the town's young people cross paths with Wendy Swan, the beautiful daughter of "The Beekeeper," one of the town's many eccentric characters. They eventually come to understand her true nature, but only after it is too late to help themselves or their town. In an attempt to try and save themselves (and their sanity) they perform a brutal, terrifying ritual, only to discover their mistake twenty years later when they are all called back to what little is left of their decimated former home.Several of the main characters suffer from what they call "waking nightmares," a kind of terrifying hallucination where both nightmare and reality are experienced simultaneously and to varying degrees. Clegg uses intense imagery that allows the reader to feel they are truly witnessing a dream, which makes the story all the more powerful. The author takes his work very seriously, with this novel taking twelve years from initial conception to publication, and the years of labor are apparent in the quality of the finished product.You Come When I Call You has all the elements I look for in a horror novel-blood, guts, terrifying imagery and dark atmosphere, but only when it serves to enhance the story rather than for its own sake; meticulous character development, such that the reader can identify with and care about each of the main characters; and a style of writing that makes the book difficult, if not impossible, to put down. You Come When I Call You is one of the best horror novels that I have read in the past year, and I give it my highest possible recommendation.