Customer Reviews

The Forbidden Zone

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

A small town becomes the center for invasion of hideous creatures, arriving from another dimension. Whitley Strieber pays superb and creepy tribute to H.P. Lovecraft. This is one of those books where you know the characters are caught up in something so sinister and evil that it's an almost no win situation. Very creepy, very dark, very Lovecraft-like. A perfect blend of horror.

Forget all the bad reviews here. They are from people who obviously do not like to have fun and pretend to enjoy Peter Straub....This novel is a mix of Lovecraft (it's dedicated to him), Machen, John Carpenter's The Thing, Mimic, Swarm, Day of the Triffids, Invasion of the Body Snatchers....Strieber throws it all into the mix and creates a ballsy, relentless horror novel thats just too damn fun!

This book has more in common with John Carpenter's version of The Thing than it does with H.P. Lovecraft's classic mythos stories. Some strange creature zaps people with a hypnotic light and takes over their bodies, turning them into shape shifting things. The handful of survivors try to escape a world that is being rapidly invaded and changed. Action packed and fun on its own terms, nonetheless the novel suffers from a certain lack of depth.

It could have been a great book. The plot is there. A fitting setting is there, too. But the the author forgot to form credible characters. Their interacting and acting is erratic and often not believable. Intelligent people like Professor(!) Kelly and Loi or a police lieutenant do not act so stupidly as they do very often. And the ending makes the impression as if the author wants to get out of the mess he has written himself into. It simply makes no sense!

I can't believe the low ratings this book is getting. This is one of Strieber's best books, and it is definetly one of the best horror stories out there. I guess I enjoyed the book more because I didn't know anything about the book at all when I started reading Chapter 1. This book is great, but try not to know the whole summary of the book before you pick it up cause that'll spoil it.

With this book Strieber shows his background in film by writing something that can best be described as a novelization of a bad 50's monster movie, with the characteristic lack of plot, absence of reason behind the decisions taken by the main characters, and their total indifference to the motivation and nature of the opposing forces.

The story, what little there are, consist of such standard ingredients as a menacing government operated experiment gone wrong, the courageous physicist who ran the project earlier but left it before it went bad and now has to fix it and some badly described supernatural monsters breaking through to our reality from a non-specified and obviously never though out "other place". Add a sprinkling of cult worship by leading town figures (quickly dropped again as it doesn't fit the rest of the book, but unfortunately not removed as it should have been), a transformation effect that makes "normal" people into more monsters (except for a newborn child, immune due to innocence, but still sought afer by the "monster") and you'll end up with something like this book, slightly entertaining at first read, but not worth reading a second time.

It's not often that I run across a book so terrible that I can't finish it, but this was certainly one of them! The plot was given away almost from the beginning, and the characters were strictly two-dimensional. I found the dialouge irritating and the actions of the main characters unbelievable. I haven't read any other books by this author, and now I probably won't.

One of the worst books I've ever (tried to) read. Had to skip to the end, and even then it wasn't worth the time commitment.

This novel is worse than the worst I read as a tad in Amazing Stories back in the 40's! No plot, paper (not even cardboard) characters,and impossible dialogue. I finished it just for the challange.Wolf in the Adirondacks.

Evidently some of the people that reviewed this book here didn't read the same one I did: This book scared me to death. I'm thrilled to find a bargain hard-cover copy - a friend loaned it to me in paperback over a year ago and I couldn't put it down, and haven't forgotten it since. Streiber's HP Lovecraft pastiche not only pays tribute to the Grand Old Man of Providence but takes him about ten steps further. The terror ratchets till you can't stand it and some of the situations are so (wonderfully) horrible you almost can't stand to read any further, but for some reason you do. I guess I'm not quite as intellectually advanced as some people: I don't require my "popcorn" books to have Deep Messages and plots out of English Lit class. This book is a scream (in more ways than one!) and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes to be scared silly and have fun at the same time.