Customer Reviews

Afterlife

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Julie Hutchinson's husband "Hut" has been murdered, and she is having trouble recovering from his death. She believes that he visits her at night while she is sleeping. She also begins to fit together fragments of his life that were unknown to her while he was alive, and they fit together into a rather strange whole --- including evidence that Hut was part of a secret project when he was a child that tested psychic abilities in children.

AFTERLIFE was a page-turner and a good, fast read. It was well-written and suspenseful and has some great twists and turns. The book seemed quite different from other Clegg works that I have read. There were some creepy moments, but the book didn't really seem likea mega-horror book to me. But don't let that stop you from reading it!

Julie Hutchinson's world takes a nosedive when she is informed that her husband has been murdered. As she tries to deal with the horrific event, she slowly comes to realize that there are many parts of her husband's past that have been kept secret from her.

Julie tries to uncover the truth of her husband's past. While doing so she begins having erotic dreams about him. Her daughter thinks she can talk to him. Her mother puts her in contact with a TV psychic. She contacts her husband's ex who is in an asylum. Eventually she begins to doubt reality. The whole story culminates in a dramatic conclusion that can give readers shivers.

This is a very interesting although a little slow to build at first. The histories of psychic studies, open and covert, tie into Julie's dilemmas. It was refreshing to find an ending that was not obvious right from the start. A fine book from a talented author (although a little shorter than previous works).

If you haven't read a Clegg novel yet, now is your chance to do so. Not only is Afterlife a great horror story, it also stands as one of Clegg's most suspenseful tale yet. This one has all the elements of a classic in the making.

Julie's life is turned upside down when she learns that her husband was brutally murdered. She is left alone to grieve with her young daughter and her strange teenage stepson. Everyone around her wants to help; her sister Melanie, her mother, her friends, her therapist... Yet no one is able to help her forget the pane of her husband's death.

But as she tries her best to return to her normal life, strange things happen to Julie. She dreams of strange, erotic thoughts. Her husband's body disappears from the morgue. She she learns about her husband's past, a past he had kept hidden from her all these years. A stranger enters her home at night and disappears. As Julie searches for the truth, she feels the constant threat of being watched, and the nightmares become more and more real. The only person she can trust is a strange television psychic who will try to help her through this ordeal.

Or is he? Clegg creates a great webb of paranoia that prevents you from trusting any of the characters except Julie. And even Julie is a flawed character. Sometimes, you root for her, and sometimes you just want to slap her in the face to make her open her eyes and accept the truth for what it truly is. Such a character only turns a very good story into an even greater one.

This story is similar to some of the genre's best. Rosemary's Baby comes to mind. Like Levin's amazing tale of suspense, Clegg creates a suspenseful tale that never lets go of the grip it has on you. You can't help yourself; you just want to keep on turning the pages way past your bedtime. And what Clegg does best is write about the grief Julie is going through. Some of the scenes early on in the story are just heart wrenching.

Douglas Clegg is fast becoming one of the greatest new voice in horror fiction, and Afterlife is the perfect example of his amazing talent. Suspenseful, full of horror, and vastly entertaining, Afterlife might very well be the best horror novel of the year!

Oh my gosh, this book should be made into a movie. You seldom find a great scary movie anymore, well this book would make a great one! It would be in the money with The Sixth Sense and Signs etc. I wish I had discovered Douglas Clegg earlier. I started with Dean Koontz and have everything he wrote, but am finding it hard to find these older ones of Clegg's. I got it from the library. This book is so exciting all the way to the last page. I found myself reading faster and faster as the excitement grew. Do yourself a favor, try to read this before it is gone.

This is a relatively short book and seemed to appear without any great publicity (unlike his more recent Priest Of Blood and Mordred). However, as good as all his books are, this, in my opinion, is Douglas Clegg writing at his best. The story of a wife whose husband is murdered is engrossing from the start. Mix into this the well-written journey of her gradual break down, the fact that her husband was not who she thought he was and, for that matter, neither was the murder, and you have an excellent story told by an excellent storyteller. The twists and turns will keep you guessing right until the end. I highly recommend this book, both to Douglas Clegg fans and those who have never read anything by this very talented author.

Douglas Clegg is a first-class writer of modern horror fiction, and AFTERLIFE is a worthy addtion to his body of work.

If you've never read Clegg before, AFTERLIFE is a great book to start with. The energy of the prose and the story's unflagging momentum will keep you from being able to set the book down.

And if you find yourself sprinting through AFTERLIFE, still hungry for more, make sure to pick up THE HOUR BEFORE DARK, which is probably Clegg's most richly conceived and executed novel to date.

Douglas Clegg is without-a-doubt one of the best horror authors out there: his novels are original and deeply captivating with superb character study. His new one is no diferent, a perfect psychological horror story that will give you the creeps. Julie Hutchinson's husband gets brutally murdered and from that point on, her life becomes one mysterious nightmare. After his body disappears from the police morgue, Julie starts to reveal secrets about her husband's past, which involved a top-secret government project: Daylight, where experiments on young children with ESP took place. With help from her mother, daughter, stepson, her husband's ex-wife and Michael Diamond, a TV psychic, Julie finds that things are not as they seem as she enters the world of reincarnation and psychic phenomena. Dark, disturbing, sad, full of passion rarely seen in horror novels, this is a great winner from a great author.

As another reviewer wrote, Clegg creates a great web of paranoia in Afterlife, leading you not to trust anyone or anything. This is a lean and mean book, and I read it all in one sitting.

Julie Hutchinson, the main character, is having a lot of trouble dealing with the brutal and mysterious murder of her husband, Jeff. Now she's having erotic nightmares and hideous hallucinations. All of this leads to her to work with Jeff's ex-wife and a popular TV psychic to figure out a tangled web of secrets in her past. What's this all have to do with Project Daylight? Well, I can't tell you that, it would ruin the fun of the book!

Great stuff, and you can't go wrong with Douglas Clegg, the master of terror!

Doug Clegg has always been good, but he knocked my socks off with "The Hour Before Dark," and this one is just as lean and mean, but even meatier. It really excels in the depth of its characters. "Afterlife" is a mystery, a horror novel, a fantasy and more. Clegg just keeps getting better.

Douglas Clegg is, one book at a time, proving himself one of the best horror writers working today, and he is in top form with his latest novel AFTERLIFE. Julie Hutchinson is a suburban housewife, the mother of a young girl and wife of a successful Doctor. Her life seems perfect, a large house, a beautiful family, but everything is not as it seems.

Her husband is brutally murdered. The police think him the victim of a serial killer who carves tattoos across the back and shoulders of his victims. Julie isn't so certain. Her mentally unstable step-son, the product of her husband's first marriage, cuts similar designs into his own arm on the very day his father is killed. Their daughter claims her father, Hut, is visiting her in the dark hours of night, and perhaps more disturbing are the erotic dreams Julie begins having shortly after the murder.

Mr Clegg has an ability to create believable, realistic characters--they have the feel and quality of a neighbor, or even a sibling, a parent--and tighten the suspense and terror as they slowly descend into their own private nightmare. Julie slowly isolates herself from her family and friends as she investigates the strange events that surround her life. She makes arrangements to catch the ghost that visits her daughter on video, and when she finally catches a glimpse it is much more than she bargained for.

She enlists the help of a television psychic, and together they uncover pieces of her husbands past. Things Julie never knew, things she never wanted to know. The key to the mystery is a defunct psychic research center called Daylight. It is located in an old warehouse. Hut, her husband, died with the door key in his pocket. The mystery builds until Julie no longer knows what, or who to believe. She is either mad, or everything she has discovered is real. The novel weaves a spell of the occult, the supernatural and death. It is violent, real, and truly frightening.

This novel is something beyond the normal everyday horror fare. The characters are fresh, the plot is original and the story is terrific. Be warned, there is a fair amount of graphic sex, but it is essential to the plot. It heightens the suspense and moves the story forward. This novel is not for the timid, but it is definitely for anyone who loves a good story, a good scare, and great writing. AFTERLIFE is as good as the modern horror novel gets.

-Gravetapping