Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining, a good idea, but I saw most of it coming, April 7, 1999
By A Customer
I picked up "Blackstone Chronicles" from a bookstore, not because I had heard anything about it, but because I wanted to read some good horror. Now, having finished the book, I can say that it was well worth the buy. A good idea, an excellent setting and it made the hours pass by rapidly. The downside was however, that the foreshadowing gave the game away from early on. Still, I am now hooked on John Saul and will be on the look-out for his other novels.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"Savoring the suffering. Delighting in the disease unleashed upon the town.", January 11, 2006
At the outset of this six-volume series, author John Saul introduces the major characters, establishes the Gothic setting in small town New Hampshire, creates foreboding about the scheduled conversion of the Blackstone Asylum into a shopping mall, and then introduces the "single dark figure that moves through the ruptured stone wall" into the silent Asylum. There the figure locates a small cubicle containing the artifacts of long-ago inmates. As these artifacts appear, mysteriously, in the lives of the present occupants of Blackstone, death and destruction result. (Plot summaries and reviews for the six separate volumes appear separately on Amazon.)
Saul tells the reader from the outset that the destruction of the Asylum will change everyone's life, then goes about proving it. Because his characters are not fully developed, they do not inspire the reader's sympathy when they change from ordinary citizens to demons or when their lives move from normalcy to chaos, especially at the beginning. The stories move along quickly and inevitably, however, the Gothic shock evolving from the amount of cruelty and the amount of horror, rather than from our knowledge of the individuals and our surprise at their behavior.
Throughout the series, the agonizing tortures (in the name of "cures") at the Asylum fifty years ago are interspersed with modern day life, and occasionally Saul gives us the name of a former employee or resident of the Asylum which enables the reader to tie a contemporary victim to the history of the Asylum. The victims are usually one or two generations removed from the events in the Asylum, however, and not directly responsible for what happened there, so one wonders why the "dark figure" is emphasizing the "sins of the father" by punishing the children or grandchildren.
Filled with blood-drenched rooms, sudden explosions, unexplained attacks on seemingly innocent people, and wholesale destruction, the series does not show clear motivation for all this horror, the shock of which dulls over time. The "dark figure" has little direct involvement in the havoc, once he has given an object from the Asylum to his next victim, and he fails to evolve as a terrifying force. Though the ending answers some of the questions, it does not connect all the victims or answer all the questions. (And many readers will figure out the identity of the "dark figure" by the end of Volume 4.) Ultimately, I was disappointed that the violence and horror exist here for their own sake. There is no accountability for the death and destruction, leaving the reader with the feeling that justice has not been served. n Mary Whipple
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Horrors, crafting credibility out of the incredible, June 16, 2002
I'm not a fan of horror fiction; it's not my genre. I read The Blackstone Chronicles as part of a project to read twenty novels, two by each of ten selected authors. Chronicles is the fourth of the twenty, and the first ever by John Saul. By my side, as I write this, is a flyer that tells me John Saul has written 30 straight N.Y. Times bestsellers, including...his six part serial novel The Blackstone Chronicles...." So how, I wonder, could I be so audacious, brazen and insolent to rate this tale a "three..." I've gotten old, however, opinionated, and it's a three. The writer of good horror fiction takes the incredible and weaves it into a cloak of credibility. The author's job is to make the reader believe, or at least vicariously wonder for awhile, if the absurd is possible. To accomplish this, the novelist must create characters that we identify with, and then suck us in to take possession of them in an improbable scene. We ought to cringe, sweat and fear the next sentence, yet have to read on despite our better judgment. I'm sorry Mr. Saul; I read Chronicles in the middle of the night by a lone 75-watt bulb and not once was I afraid of going to the toilet. I liked the town, though. At the beginning of the combined version of the six part series, in the "Dear Reader" section, Mr. Saul admits "I have been living in the fictional town of Blackstone in my head." Me too. I was raised in a small New England town. Although the place where I grew up is not quite like Blackstone, it's close enough. And from the perspective of a young boy, we had some neighbors that were as quirky and scary as the lost souls in the imaginary Blackstone are supposed to be. Still, in the end, especially in the end, the tale didn't work for me. Perhaps the series structure is at fault. Each of the six parts deals with a "gift" that causes mayhem. So designed, the author had to deal with six improbabilities and make them credible enough to make us scared. As I recall, even Steven King will tackle only one implausibility per novel. In the afterword, Mr. Saul mentions that he might again write about the citizens of Blackstone. If he does, I hope it's about just one book-length incredibility, and that his maniacs stay true to character.
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