This was my first book by John Saul and it probably will not be my last book. He is great way with words where things come off as smooth and not tedious and overdrawn. The story was the actual problem in this book. Now there was not anything wrong with the actual story (sure, there were some inconsistencies with it and things that were not explained/developed fully) but the problem was that the actual story was quite boring IMO. Filled with plenty of religious material that is brought on by a religious town folks who believe in demons, ghosts, and devil taking a form of anything, especially a human being who disagrees with them and their ways of life. This is the point where we are introduced to Ted and Janet Conway who are a married couple with three kids (a 16 year old twins (Jared and Kim) and a small a baby, Molly). Ted is an alcoholic whose life is controlled and destroyed by alcohol. Janet is a strong woman who is trying to stay with Ted for the sake of the kids. They decide to move to a small town of St. Albans in Louisiana to fix up a recently inherited house and hopefully their marriage. Once they get there, they decide to convert it to a hotel or an inn but the only problem is due to the troubled and very dark history of this particular Conway house, the people of St. Albans don’t want anyone fixing it up since they think it is haunted. From this point, some weird things start to happen. The younger people in the family start to have bad dreams, have visions, and generally have tough time distinguishing reality from a dream world. The boy in the family starts to behave in a weird way which his dad cites as a him just growing up and going through puberty. However, more things are happening to him besides him getting hair everywhere and getting shitton of zits. Without spoiling anything else, this book was well written but not original by any means. Most of the book consists of characters assuring one another than nothing they experience is real, people having bad dreams and thinking it happened in real life or that it is some sort of an omen, or characters walking down a street or hallways and thinking they heard or smelled or saw something weird and creepy which usually turns out that it is their head playing tricks on them. The end is very predictable. Bunch of stuff did not get explained and the book left it so it would mean a sequel might be at hand like in movies where a killer is supposedly dead but camera pans out and shows him twitching or opening an eye or something. This book would have been perfect for a Lifetime movie. I would not recommend it since I think the author has much better stories that he wrote in the past. I think this was just a paycheck for him and nothing else.
the conway family moves to st. albans becaue the father inherited the old family mansion - standing empty and abandoned for the last 40 years. he wants to open a hotel in that mansion but the inhabitants of st. albans are against it because they think that the conway family is somehow connected to the devil/something evil and bad because in the last century there were lots of mysterious happenings at the mansion like suicides, people and babies going missing etc.soon the oldest son of the family starts behaving weird and you think that it's gonna be another 'the omen'-story: a boy possessed by the devil/being the devil's son and enjoying the fact the he can make people around him do weird stuff/have bad things happen to them.but on the last twenty pages there is a little twist in the story that makes you look at the whole book from a different perspective...still it isn't such a big twist to make up for the fact that the whole story isn't that original.it is a nice, a little creepy story (if you read it at night ^^) but nothing world-moving. just an easy, quick, a bit scary read.
Do You like book The Right Hand Of Evil (2000)?
So, it's been a while since I have reviewed any books on here, mainly because it's been awhile since I actually finished reading a book. John Saul did an amazing job of bringing imagery horror to light with this novel. Grasping it from all aspects so that one could really indulge themselves in the story line, growing to like and dislike certain characters, and even at some points be frightened of other characters inpspite of the fact you know they aren't real. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a good horror/suspence read.
—Kevin Muirhead
The standard thriller story, though this one I could imagine being made into a movie. Not an amazing movie, about the same as the book I would imagine. Ted Conway is a drunk who has just lost yet another assistant management position at a hotel. His wife is extremely frustrated, but is in a position where she feels like there is nothing she can do with three kids to support. Luckily, Ted's aunt dies and they inherit a beautiful ancestral home. But there are secrets surrounding the old home that no one understands. And no one in the town is very happy that the Conways' hope to turn it into a hotel. There are a few holes, and a couple of animals getting murdered, and the ending kind of felt choppy, but that's a thriller for you I suppose. This was also one of the last books my grandmother gave me, so it will stay on my shelf for a while before reselling.
—Karissa
I wanted a page turner to read over winter break, so I chose this one since I'm interested in haunted house thriller novels. The beginning of the book was a little dull and I almost gave up on reading it, but I stuck with and am mostly glad I did. The story is about a family, the Conways, that inherits a house that has a terrible history of suicides and murders. The townspeople are suspicious of the Conways and their new house. As the book progresses, the Conway men change and become very creepy. The women in family are naive and too trusting, though this does change a bit through the book. There was a quite a bit of violence, especially against animals, which was hard to read. Very good descriptions of the possessed people in the book and the dreamlike scenes where the possessed are committing their evil acts were terrifying. This was a fun vacation read.
—Mara
