August 3, 2009
A two-time International Horror Guild Award finalist for short fiction, Langan pens a surprisingly plodding first novel. Lovely widow Veronica Croydon corners the unnamed narrator at a party and offers to relate the weird story of her husband, Roger, and his disappearance. She spins an odd tale of adultery, family struggles and a house possibly haunted by the spirit of Roger's son, Ted, a Special Forces officer who died in Afghanistan after Roger disowned and cursed him. Though Veronica's story spans two nights, the level of detail stretches the confessional conceit well beyond the bounds of believability. Literary allusions offer a spark of interest, but even fans of Lovecraft and Peter Straub, whom Langan tries hard to emulate, will find it difficult to navigate the unnecessary tangents and repetitious minutiae that plague this pseudoliterary potboiler.
October 1, 2009
Langans superbly crafted short fiction, collected recently in Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (2008), has given horror fans a taste of his chilling imagination. In his first novel, an atmospherically rich, extended ghost tale, he proves himself equally adept at weightier fare. In this story-within-a-story, the narrator, a young writer at a weekend stay with friends, is cornered by Veronica Croydon, a beautiful widow whose husband, Roger, has recently disappeared without explanation. During the next two nights, Veronica recounts an unnerving tale involving the couples cavernous home, a family curse, and the death of Rogers son, Ted, a Special Forces officer, on an Afghanistan battlefield. A literature professor specializing in Dickens, Roger was only too keenly aware of the irony in his circumstances after he disowned Ted during a violent family argument and later felt haunted by Teds ghost. Filled with finely nuanced prose, vividly realized characters, and deft psychological terror, Langans first novel makes a fair bid for a place in the front ranks of horror, beside its most celebrated practitioners.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)