Customer Reviews

Dead Man's Song

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I loved Ghost Road Blues, which won the Stoker award, and was looking forward to the sequel, Dead Man's Song. I wasn't disappointed. It was good to reconnect with characters like Crow and Val and The Bone Man. It was good to see again heroes who are heroic and villains who are evil.

Maberry's greatest strengths lie in mixing action with atmospheric suspense. He does the spooky woods thing as well as anyone out there. It just so happened that I was alone in the house for a few days when I finished Dead Man's Song. I may be staying up late tonight with all the lights on.

In this follow up to Ghost Road Blues, the problems keep piling up for the citizens of Pine Deep. The evil in their midst is growing stronger, while those who have the strength and resolve to fight it are either unaware of it, and/or unaware of their own power, while most of their fellow residents are infected or cowed by the evil. Fortunately, the bad guys aren't that organized, either. (Maberry's strongest gift, I think, is to depict both the mesmerizing and potent evil when one bad guy is on terrible display by himself, but how their cowardice and backstabbing derail them whenever they try to get together, while the good guys get stronger whenever they come together; if you've seen the Legion of Doom vs the Super Friends, you know the dynamic and how entertaining it is to watch.) My only complaint is that the pacing here is glacial until the last five chapters. And the "red shirts" are introduced a little too obviously, before being torn to bloody bits. But it definitely built a lot of suspense and sympathy for our heroes, and I can't wait to find out what happens in the third installment.

Great continuation of the series. This just gets deeper and deeper. There is definitely a feeling of buildup throughout this book and I cannot wait to read the final in the trilogy. Maberry writes so well you really feel like you are in the characters situations. He sets the mood perfectly and continues to surprise me with how much he has set up for the final book. Great author and I highly recommend all his books.

This is the second book to the Pines Deep Trilogy. In my opinion, readers need to start with the first book, which is Ghost Road Blues and then the second book, Dead Man's Song picks up from where the first book left off. Honestly, I enjoyed the second book much more than the first. The writing was much more entertaining, Maberry's words created a dark, rich environment and the dialog was well thought out with it always feeling like something around the corner was going to jump out at you. As for my perspective, there weren't much slow parts in this book as with the first, so I don't understand why people are complaining about the plot slowing down. Even if readers think that, it's very important to remember that it's a trilogy and it probably should be just one whole book, so there are going to be times where the author has to build the characters and the environment and it can become tedious. However, this book did not take that route. To a horror fan that is looking for a long and entertaining book to read, I recommend this series. Jonathan Maberry is a talented writer and story teller with a bright future.

Dead Man's Song is the middle filler for Maberry's good, often great and occasionally exceptional, trilogy about the haunted town of Pine Deep. It's not as crisp and riveting as Ghost Road Blues (there is a love scene that goes on for a dozen pages), and a good editor could could have sliced 75 or a hundred pages without missing an iota of important story. Alas, you take the good with the bad sometimes. I wouldn't trade Maberry for a bushel load of most suspense/horror writers nowadays. He's entertaining and creative. I've come to care about what happens to Crow and Val and Mike and several other characters. The blood-letting is ever flowing, but believable in the story's context. Great villains and conversational dialogue help keep the story fresh. One of the things Maberry does well is maintain and switch between several different plotlines with relative ease. Dead Man's Song moves the story along and is a worthwhile read. I'd say it's the weakest of the trilogy, but it's still better than most of what's available. 3 1/2 stars for this one.

It just didn't seem to go anywhere from start to finish. I wouldn't really say this feels like a horror book personally and I've had a better horror experience from many other books. Maybe I just didn't get the right book this time.

I never write reviews, but I almost didn't buy this book after seeing some of the negative reviews. I liked the 1st book, so I broke down and ordered it, figuring that it would be more of the same as the 1st book and I would probably get bored of it(not that the 1st book was bad at all, but I couldn't imagine what more could happen). It is nothing like the 1st. Yes, the same people and town, but now it really picks up momentum and we are getting into the supernatural on a big scale. I could not put it down. Yes there are a couple of typos that did not get found when edited, but give me a break, it's over 500 pages. Anyway, if you are really caught up in the story, you never notice the small stuff. I can't wait for the next. In spite of the person raving about it not having an ending, I am so glad it didn't. Now I have the rest of the story to look forward to.

Mayberry isn't inventing the wheel but he clearly loves horror and for the first 200 or so pages of this new novel, I was with him, particularly in the stand alone sections he calls "Interludes", which are reminiscent of the set pieces from "Salem's Lot". He also write short scary moments describing approaching evil, which in turn reminded me of similar bits in "Ghost Story". I stayed up late reading those initial pages, which hardly ever happens for me with this genre any more. But Maybeerry badly needs a new editor. He can't stop writing, and hinting at apocalyptic things to come. There's a pathologist in this novel who figures out there the town is under siege, but it takes him a week in the book's time scheme to tell anyone. He keeps setting up appointments with the hero that never come to pass. When there are demons afoot, you don't make appointments, you run screaming to the hero! There's also a nearly 7-page love scene (I counted) more than half way thru that's lovingly graphic, well written and utterly pointless. I kept expecting a demon was going to crash thru the door for the ultimate coitus interruptus, but no, Mayberry just loves his lovers and wants them to be happy. That's nice, but in a 500 page book, you want mayhem to have ensuded by page 300, not excess human feeling (Dean Koontz disease). Finally, "Dead Man's Song" just comes off as a long set-up for a third book, "Bad Moon Rising", the first chapter of which is included here. It's pretty good. Maybeerry can do beginnings. But he's got to learn to cut to the chase. When he does (or gets a real editor), he may write a great book.

Following Ghost Road Blues, Maberry publishes Dead Man's Song as its follow-up. And although I wasn't a huge fan of the first installment, I was a bit curious about what would happen next. The answer to that? After 500 pages, nothing at all. This book is so repetitive and tedious that I almost stopped reading halfway through.

Things aren't going well for the citizens of Pine Deep. Halloween is approaching, their crops are dying, people are disappearing or turning up dead... Doesn't bode well for a town that survives on its tourists around Halloween time. Creatures are appearing all over the place. Werewolves? Vampires? Ghosts? Angels? Take your pic... This is like an old monster movie mishmash.

I could go on and on retelling the plot points, but honestly, there isn't much point in doing so. All we need to know is that we have supernatural killers and we have the good guys. This is pretty much all this book seems to tell us. I'm all for long narratives. I'm a huge fan of long books like The Witching Hour, The Stand, It, Summer of Night... Books that give you substance while taking their time to tell its narrative. They give you enough to thrill you and keep you entertained, and they give you finales that are well worth your wait. But with this book, you don't get enough to keep you sustained or entertained. Even without having read the next installment (hopefully its last), I can tell that this is the kind of story that could have easily been told in one single tome.

When it's a sequel, I hate it when authors think that they need to retell us everything that happened in the first book. Not only does Maberry lose a lot of time doing this, but he also repeats things that he's already mentioned in the novel two, or three times. If a chapter ends with something, then a few chapters later, he's gonna take way too much time reexplaining what we've just read. This book could have been cut by 150 pages or more easily.

Maberry can write and his inside jokes are witty at times. But turning our lead hero in a jujutsu master doesn't really entertain me. And having bad guys that just disappear and reappear when its convenient isn't all that thrilling either. I just wasn't really caring anymore when I reached the halfway point. Our monsters are real evil, and our good guys are so pure they're almost godsend.

Dead Man's Song has a few good thrilling moments, but they are few and far between. I can't wait to read a Maberry story that is told in one single volume. Then maybe we could be entertained and truly thrilled! It doesn't really bode well when, after reading two books in the series, I'm not even that excited to read its conclusion.

This book didn't cover any new ground since the first installment of this trilogy. It went on and on and never really reached any kind of point. All of this nonsense could easily be wrapped up in one book, but I guess the guy needs to make a buck. At the same time, I got the impression he submitted a rough draft and the publishing company went with it. It's disconcerting to see that he is listed in the back under his biography as a writing instructor when there were so many misspellings and incorrect use of words in a sentence or wrong tense, etc. The inconsistencies were distracting as well. Roger Guthrie was mentioned as a cousin in the first part of the book, then towards the end, he was mentioned as an uncle. There are more I could point out, but why bother. I should have bailed instead of finishing the book because it was insulting to horror fiction readers everywhere. That's another thing, not even close to being scary, perhaps because I was so bored by it all.