17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stupendous, breathtaking, absorbing, riveting, terrifying..., April 22, 2005
This review is from: The Bleeding Season (Hardcover)
Do I have your attention yet? Once in awhile a book comes along that is so well written and so captivating that it leaves you simply breathless in it's wake, and 'The Bleeding Season' is just that book.
Using a similar theme to Stephen King's 'The Body' and Robert R. McCammon's 'Boy's Life', one of a group of boys struggling towards adulthood and beyond, 'The Bleeding Season' is no camp follower or second contender to either of the mentioned famous stories.
Told in first person by Alan Chance, one of five boys growing up in Potter's Cove, a small town on the coast of rural Massachusetts not far from New Bedford. Life was seemingly happy until their teens, when Tommy was killed by a careless driver. Only Alan, Donald, Rick, and Bernard remained, now deprived of their leader. The boys grow into men, Alan into a failed writer and menial night security job, Rick to a bouncer after a one year stint in prison, Donald into a dead end word processing job, and Bernard into a used car salesman after injuring his knee in Marine training.
And then, just shy of their fortieth birthdays, Bernard commits suicide, leaving behind only a duffle bag and a strange recorded message filled with doubts and fear for the rest. Alan cannot let go of Bernard, feeling compelled to discover the deeper meaning behind Bernard's final and lonely goodbye. What he uncovers is the stuff that nightmares are made of.
Alan, Donald, and Rick find out that Bernard was never who they had thought he was, and slowly begin to uncover a long trail of purely dark evil that had been festering underneath their very noses. From past to present, Bernard's ghosts and demons begin to haunt their sleep, spewing out bodies in their wakes and leaving behind a sense of utter darkness. Even when Alan looses first his job and then his wife Toni, he still cannot turn away from the secrets hidden inside their past.
Greg F. Gifune's writing is real and raw, deeply poignant, excessively talented, and leaves behind naked emotion painted with words. Rarely will I read a book that can't be found for less than forty dollars and tell my listeners that it is worth the cost, but 'The Bleeding Season' definitely is. Buy it, read it, then resell it if you can. But if you are like me, the impact will be too completely brutal for you to do anything other than clutch the book to your chest as you scream out, 'Why? Why? Why?'
Gifune has mastered the creeping horror and intense dread of confronting the darker side of humanity and beyond, the demons that dwell both inside and outside the human flesh, and he serves them up on a shattered platter here for our minds to devour. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, no aficionado of horror should miss it, definitely a 10 star novel. Enjoy!
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good But LessThan I Expected, January 21, 2008
This was my first experience with Gifune and I came away from this novel with ambivalent feelings, to say the least. This is truly a work of dark fiction. His writing is exceptionally intelligent and his atmospherics can give you a creepy feeling up your spine. Yet equally, I was disappointed with other elements which I shall share later.
I have seen comparisons of "The Bleeding Season" to Stephen King's "The Body" yet I find it perhaps more similar to his coming-of-age and returning to finish unfinished business portrayed in "It." Five childhood friends (Alan, Tommy, Rick, Donald, and Bernard) form a lifelong bond growing up in the small town of Potter's Cove on the rural coast of Massachusetts, although Tommy, their spiritual leader is tragically killed when hit by a car as a teenager. Unknown to the boys at the time, this sad event sets in motion a series of events that changes them and their hopes and dreams forever and culminates when they approach their forties with the suicide of Bernard.
Bernard seemingly had always been the most vulnerable of group, a notorious liar and exaggerator who was always accepted as part of the whole even though he seemed to have the least to offer. After his unexpected suicide, the three survivors receive an audio suicide/farewell note from him that is filled with philosophical accusations, painful revelations, and critical evaluations of each of them from his perspective.
As hurtful as the thoughts and comments in the audiotape are, Alan, the "conscience" of the group, cannot let Bernard's spirit and memory go without delving deeper for meaning and substance behind Bernard's death. Contributing to their need to find out "why" is the fact that each of the friends experience the same macabre dreams that contain a dead Bernard and other creepy symbolism. With very little to go on but his duffle bag, a photo of an unknown woman, and their own memories, the three surviving friends, prodded by Alan, begin an investigation that quickly reveals Bernard was never who or what they thought he was.
Indeed, a trail of mutilated bodies begins to turn up along with more clues and indications that their deceased friend was perhaps surrounded by a darkness and evil that none of them had ever suspected. A race against time ensues as the investigation risks friendships, marriages, and sanity as the three move ever closer to discovering the source of the evil that may or may not ultimately claim them also.
My problem with "The Bleeding Season" was twofold. The pacing was ponderously slow in the first half of the book. Although I felt I knew where things were headed, it took an awful long time to get there. Secondly, while the characters were fully developed by Gifune, I found myself not caring about any of them on a deeper level--I never felt invested personally in their struggle. Even Alan was unsympathetic to me as he clumsily handled his relationship with Toni and as he stubbornly stayed on task through sometimes confusing dark philosophical musings. The only compelling factor left to me as the reader was to discover the ultimate source of the evil to solve the mystery.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
So easy to pick up and so hard to put down, March 8, 2004
This review is from: The Bleeding Season (Hardcover)
The Bleeding Season by Greg F. Gilune is a unique horror novel about five inseparable best friends. When one of them is struck by a car and killed, things change forever between them all. As they approach their fortieth birthday, another of the friends commits suicide. There is a string of hideous murders, and the three surviving friends must quickly solve the mystery of evil incarnate before the death toll rises to claim their own lives -- or worse! Macabre reading, The Bleeding Season is one of those horror fantasy novels which are so easy to pick up and so hard to put down.
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