Customer Reviews

Furnace

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

To Lee from Denver - Yes, Murial Gray is a woman - she is a Glaswegian who used to present The Clothes Show on British terrestrial TV, but that really doesn't matter: I agree with you that she has an incredible talent for writing horror, creating mind-blowingly original concepts and conjuring up all manner of creepy and disturbing situations involving sensitively drawn characters with heartfelt emotional dilemmas. Just thought I'd clear that up for you.

And to another reviewer who said she can't believe a woman wrote this book: why not? Do men and women have such different styles? Are we still living in the days where women have to change their names to things like George (Elliot) to be taken seriously? Obviously, if you're expecting Anne Rice's sensual style of writing, you'll be disappointed by this, but that's no reason to slate a book. Murial Gray is far closer to Stephen King (but far FAR better) in style and deserves credit for appealing to all sorts of people across the sexes. I don't think women, or men for that matter, should be pigeon-holed as writing for a single-sex audience. Check out Robin Hobb, a (wait for it) female fantasy author who writes incredible stories that relate both the male and female viewpoints with exceptional clarity and understanding.

And to everyone else: this is a great book. Regardless of Murial Gray's sex, she is a force to be reckoned with in the horror genre, putting a vital human element into her horror stories that many other authors fail to do. It works on a horror level, but at the same time the characters are fully developed and thus it works on an emotional level too: whether this is because she is a female author, or merely because she is in tune with her own emotions and fear, is a matter of conjecture. If you need more convincing, buy this novel, and if you like it, take on the longer and more complex 'The Trickster', another novel with Gray's acute, pinnacle style. Now I'll get off my soap-box and retire...

I had never heard of Muriel Gray until I saw the sleek mass market paperback cover of Furnace shouting out at me from the shelves of a local bookstore. The back seemed intriguing enough to buy and put in my WinterRead pile. Well, I just finished this book (I started yesterday) and let me just say WOW! Paced to beat lightning, this book didn't let up until the end!

Josh Spiller is a long distance truck driver who happens to take a wrong turn into a very sinister Virginia town. A town by the name of Furnace. While attempting to find his way out of the town a strange looking woman pushes a baby filled stroller under Josh's big rig. When Josh stops, dumbfounded and horrified by what has just happened the woman is nowhere to be seen, unfortunately the remains of the baby are. Josh is quickly absolved form any wrongdoing and shaken, he's back on the road. But this time, it's the road to Hell.

This story has all the elements of a classic Horror tale. The small town that keeps sinister secrets. Monsters both human and some worse. Dark rituals. Rich characterization. Action packed sequences that terrify and make you continue to read with white-knuckled tension. Don't start reading this at night if you have to work in the morning, you might miss out on some sleep! Muriel Gray earned herself a fan with this one. Note: the author is apparently from Scotland and you might note some British spellings of words, but don't worry, Mrs. Gray's knowledge of America never comes into question. I sincerely hope the front cover of the book isn't lying and that we can expect Furnace to be coming to movie screens soon. Definitely cinematic. I'm also looking forward to reading Muriel Gray's first Horror novel, Trickster.

A great, fun read for Horror fans and Action fans alike. Three Days Alive Permitted.

When I picked up this book ans saw it was written by a woman....i put it back down. But I was so intrigued by the story i bought it. I am glad I did. Mrs. Grey is an excellant story teller and has taken a fresh and new approach to horror. Written with a Man as the main character and the ladies as the bad guys was amazing. The story moved along an an incredible pace and was well researched out and well written. I hope to read more of mrs. greys books in the future. Move over Mr. King and Mr. Koontz... there is a new horror writer in town....and she is gunning for both of you!

Wayne Donahue

I loved this book at the start. The story was so engaging and ominous. The baby being run over at the start and the evil, evil, evil looking bird following Josh everywhere had me hooked. The characterization was ace too and I felt for Josh a great deal in many of his dire circumstances.

But then the plot just got bogged down in hokey black magic mumbo jumbo. It lost control and just went crazy. Perhaps I didn't read it right or had other expectation but I think that it all could have been told in a better and less stupidly from that point on. Too bad considering such a strong opening.

I've never done serious over-the-road trucking, but I've driven hundreds of thousands of miles around the U.S., fairly often pulling the kind of marathons that Josh Spiller and his trucker buddies do. The American road is a world of its own, and I've read few books that capture it. Muriel Gray really nails it, which is surprising given that she's from Scotland. She mentions in the acknowledgements that she took a cross-country trip with a trucker as part of her research. She was obviously paying attention.

As for the rest, the characters are believable, the plot moves right along, and it's nice to read a good novel about America where the characters are working class. This is popular fiction, not serious literature, but it's a darn good read.

Never heard of this author, but thought I'd give it a go after reading a pretty fly review in a magazine, and when I found out that Stephen King himself rates her! (She did a big interview with him in England. It's on the net.) Hey, I wasn't disappointed. This rocks. The story gripped me from the first shot and kept me guessing right up to the very last minute. Scary, thrilling, and funny in places too. ( I loved Eddie!) I'm going to check out all Gray's other books if they're half as good as this. Miss this one and you can't call yourself a horror fan!

Halfway through reading Muriel Gray's novel "Furnace," I began to think of the 1973 movie "The Wicker Man." In that movie, there's a community based on pagan sacrfice and it's the outsider who ends up as the victim (and if you haven't seen The Wicker Man, forget I said that). While the differences between the two abound, Furnace and The Wicker Man share that strongest connecting tie; the idea of human sacrifice bringing fortuity to the worshippers.

Josh Spiller is a truck driver who just found out his girlfriend Elizabeth is pregnant. He's overjoyed, but she's not keeping it. This sparks the argument that separates them for the rest of the book. Elizabeth storms out, and Josh, to deal with this new stress, accepts a load of aluminum going to Alabama. The time away may calm them both down. On the way, he detours through the small town of Furnace, Virginia, initially looking for something to eat. On a busy street, he's distracted and turns to look just in time to see a woman shoving a baby stroller into the street, and under the wheels of Josh's truck.

At first he's terrified because he's been without sleep for longer than the law allows, but later he realizes it was a terrible accident. The mother forgot to set the brake on the stroller and the wind carried the baby into the street. But what about the woman he saw pushing the stroller into his path, Josh thinks?

The sheriff dismisses this as shock because the woman Josh saw is the town councillwoman, a bible-toting Christian. Her fliers are all over town. Josh must have seen her picture and his tired mind played the incident in his head as seeing the woman, Nelly McFarlane, pushing the seven-day-old Amy Nevin into the street.

The whole thing was an accident, and Josh is released.

Outside Furnace, he picks up a hitchhiker, 21-year-old Griffin who's also leaving Furnace, saying she was always an outsider there. And what IS going on in Furnace, Josh wonders. For a small town with no visible means of support, the houses sure are nice. The people there really live pretty high on the hog.

The gist of Furnace is that, in his insistance there was a woman behind the baby, and his refusal to change his statement to the contrary, he's incurred the wrath of Furnace.

". . . you must have pi**ed them off bad," Griffin tells him.

Their punishment is meeted out in a seven-inch strip of dried flesh from the dead baby Amy's body. On this strip are strange markings, along with a note: Three Days Alive Permitted. In the alchemical rules of Furnace, that means Josh has three days to, not only figure out who slipped him the rune--the strip of flesh--but also to slip it back to them, willingly and unknowingly.

As Griffin tells him, "It's not going to be easy. You can't let the rune caster know what you're doing. Do you understand? Whoever cast them won't let you within a mile of them."

"Then what's the point?"

"The point is it's your only hope. Even if it's a slim one."

There's cheesy drama galore in this book, but it's pretty fun, too.

And what happens if the three days pass and Josh isn't able to pass the runes back to the caster?

"It's a hot elemental."

"Talk sense."

. . .

"Okay. If you want to use the language of Dark Age ignorance. It's a fire demon."

And if he happens to pass them to the wrong person? It'l l be as if they'd been lost or destroyed and Josh would still face the evil of the demon.

The thing that kept me reading was wondering how the hell Josh is going to, not only figure out who sipped him the runes, but how is he going to give them back, willingly and unknowingly? That's a hell of a thing to have to do, but Josh Spiller is a hell of an heroic character, and he manages just fine. Gray, who's a Glasgow woman, writes this Pittsburgh truck driver as if she's been one herself for the past fifteen years.

This was, as I said, a fun book to read. My dad's a truck driver and it was interesting to see the inner workings of the profession. I'd like to get him to read it and see what he thinks.

I did have a few problems. Most of the chapters start with subplots for a few paragraphs or pages before returning to Josh's story, the one we're interested in, and some of them--the subplots--on finishing the book seem really unnecessary. There's one that talks about something waiting to be born and at first we think it's Elizabeth's unborn child, but later learn differently and, in retrospect, it didn't need to be there.

Also the ends (there were two, the climax of Josh's story, and a short wrap-up in Furnace) were predictable pages before they came. And the end of Josh in the book wasn't what you'd expect. Given that throughout most of the book all he wants is to get home to Elizabeth, you expect him to in the end. He probably does, but it's not shown.

Another complaint was that it took way too long for the action to start. We meet Josh on his way home from delivering a load. He stops at a truck stop, he phones Elizabeth, he goes home, he sleeps, he gets up, he gives Elizabeth the gift he bought for her at the truck stop, he finds out she's pregnant, they argue, she leaves, he leaves, he drives, he gets hungry, he stops in Furnace. We're on page 35 before he ever sees the FURNACE sign. And it's another 10 pages before he runs over baby Amy. On page 83, Josh sees LEAVING FURNACE, and still by this point nothing much has happened. In fact, he doesn't find the note THREE DAYS ALIVE PERMITTED until page 135. That seemed like a whole lot of setup that could have been compressed to a whole lot less.

I was hipped to the book when I asked on [...] if anyone could suggest a really good horror novel. This one was named and our library happened to have it. They're right, it's a pretty good book. Unfortunately, it's nothing spectacular. Or maybe I'm just jaded and too hard to please. After some of the other horror novels I've reviewed, "Furnace" seems pretty tame. But maybe that's why this one's released by Doubleday instead of one of the small presses. The contrasts between them are very different levels of horror. Furnace is a mainstream horror novel all the way and any random reader can pick it up and enjoy themselves. But a true horror fan may be left wanting more.

This book could be considered a sequel, of sorts, to Jacques Tourneur's famous horror film Curse of the Demon, which is based on M. R. James' classic story, "Casting the Runes." The plot is pretty well identical to Tourneur's creepy masterpiece, only updated and relocated from England to the hills of West Virginia.

Long-distance trucker Josh Spiller finds himself off the beaten track in an oddly affluent little mountain town called Furnace, where a woman cold-bloodedly pushes an infant in its stroller in front of his eighteen-wheeler. The local constabulary are in no doubt it was an accident, but they don't believe his story about the woman pushing the baby - Spiller's description of her is that of their town benefactoress and councillor, Nelly McFarlane.

Stymied, Spiller leaves town and picks up a teenaged girl hitchhiker named Griffin, who is anxious to leave Furnace because she considers it a bad place, though she won't say precisely why. Soon, Spiller notices diabolical phenomena following him around - sulfurous smells, evil apparitions, claw marks in his truck - and the discovery of an unidentified parchment in his wallet is fingered by Griffin as the cause. Seems Furnace's financial prosperity is attached to a little old-fashioned witchcraft, and the runic parchment in Spiller's possession is a supernatural tracking device for a demonic assassin due to dismember Spiller before daybreak - that is, unless he can figure out exactly who slipped it to him, and can slip it back to them before the appointed hour...

This novel suffers badly from excess padding and a plot-point for plot-point lift from Tourneur - but it is quite well-written and enjoyable on its own merits, all the same. Anyone who enjoys this book would be well advised to check out its inspirations - and the same goes vice-versa, for fans of Tourneur's movie and James' original story.

Muirel Gray's Furnace grabbed my attention quickly and held it captive through the first quarter of the book. Unfortunately, I found my attention waning during the second and third quarters, as the story moved too slowly for my taste and introduced some sub-plots that were somewhat disjointed and/or uninteresting. Gray did manage to recapture some of my attention and interest in the final quarter of the book but by this point I was as much interested in finishing it so I could move on to my next book as in finding out how the story ends. Furnace could easily have been an "8" or possibly a "9" with some necessary editing.

Furnace is one of my favorte reads. Ms. Gray captures a great hero in this book. You understand him and what makes him tick. She also captures the area that this book takes place in very well. Even though she doesn't name "real" places or people, I knew where she was, because I grew up in that area off of Interstate 81. Ms. Gray did a wonderful job of making her people and places come alive. She has a great understanding of the "back" area of rural Virginia. The plot was good. Reminded me of the old movie "Curse of the Demon", but taken further in plot. She surprised me several times. Her sub-plotting kept me on the edge of my seat too. Very good read.