7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
INFERNO OF HATRED, October 29, 2001
Carolyn Rogers marries her childhood flame, the rich Philip Sturgess. The last male heir in the Massachusetts town's local nobility, Philip Sturgess is an impressive man. Unlike his forebears including his aged mother Abigail and 12-year-old spoiled daughter, Tracy, Philip is a kind and reasonable man. He is not too different in temperament and interest from Carolyn's first husband, Alan Rogers, whom she divorced.
Twelve-year-old Beth Rogers is miserable at Hilltop, the Sturgess home. Tracy treats her shabbily, humiliates her and does whatever she can to make Beth's life miserable. Beth seeks solace in her old friends who lived on Cherry Street ("where we were happy") and the times she spends with her father.
A gentle, intelligent man, Alderman Rogers is involved in a project with Philip Sturgess. Both men want to reopen an old shoe mill with an incindiary history. One century earlier in 1886, several child workers perished in a fire in the old mill. Questionable incidents surrounding the mill crop up; its history looms large. Alderman Rogers, a town alderman as well as an architect/builder has taken on the project at Philip Sturgess' request.
Like Michelle from "Comes the Blind Fury," Beth believes she has made contact with a child who died a century earlier in the fire. Like Michelle, Beth is 12 and believes in the supernatural.
Strange things happen in the mill. Two boys die in similar circumstances several decades apart; the place reeks of fire. Questions around the old mill are not resolved and the story concludes in a blast of heat.
Sympathetic characters, a spooky plot and a heated resolution all make for a compelling story.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
John Saul Delivers ! ! !, January 24, 2000
A well written tale that primarily focuses on a little girl's private struggle for love and acceptance among her new peers when her mother re-marries and she is thrust into a whole new unfriendly world. Add to that the haunting secret of an old shoe mill and the vengefl spirit of the little girl that dwells within its cursed walls and you've got a story to remember.
It's got a few plot holes but the characters and the story line are well written so if you like John Saul you'll enjoy this one.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Builds Patiently Into A Riveting And Moving Horror Tale, September 4, 2007
It seems to be a John Saul defining characteristic to write in a plainer, simpler style than most of horror's other consistently good authors. It also seems to be a Saul trademark to tackle familiar, not especially original-sounding material, and to open it up in such a way as one quickly feels they know exactly where things are going. More notable, though, is Saul's ability to use that plain language, those simple premises, and the illusion that things will unfold predictably, to continually create intriguing, genuinely scary tales with characters one can care about, with ideas that one can really get into more and more as the book goes along, and with out-of-nowhere surprises and twists that start cropping up just when the novel feels like it's boxed itself into a corner and can't possibly move in any unforseen direction.
"Hellfire" is the story of an old mill with a dark history, that's about to be worked on for the first time into a century and converted into a shopping mall. The central character of the tale is Beth, a 13 year-old girl who moves in with her mother to the mansion belonging to her mother's new husband, (Beth's stepfather), and his daughter (slightly older than Beth), mother, and staff of servants. Inside the mill, someone or something is not happy with its being opened up, and Beth seems to develop a connection with that prescence. When you're working material like this, it can either come off feeling like you're treading cliched ground, or like you're treading classic ground. Classic ground turns out to be the case here, as "Hellfire" develops into a great addition to the realm of horror material involving haunted buildings and/or menacing prescences. In the early chapters, the novel builds up slowly, developing characters, taking some along lines where you really like, others along lines that you really start hating them; and slowly mounting an air of mystery and later, dread. Beth's new home is not happy, tormented by her nasty stepsister and under the disapproving glare of her snobbish grandmother, but one interesting twist is the situation with Beth's mother, her new stepfather, and her biological father. What's different is that Phillip Sturgess (the stepfather) and Alan Rogers (the father) are best friends and have stayed that way, and there's no great acrimony between Carolyn (Beth's mother) and Alan. Usually in novels with the divorce/remarriage angle present, there's a lot of angst and such, but in a refreshing twist, Beth's parents seem to have parted simply for the real-life reason that sometimes things don't work out. Having a likable core group like this becomes important to the tale as things around the protagonists start to turn darker, in both supernatural and more worldly ways.
The dark history of the mill - drawing a lot on real-life horrors and inequalities of the 1800s - is intertwined with the Sturgess family history, and both begin to be revealed simultaneously. I found that with this novel I could really feel in sync with the characters - it's like you can feel a portion of what they're feeling directly, not just from an observer's vantage point, and there are a couple of instances in which a character's discovery - such as a secret, or of the death of another of the book's characters - really packs an uncommon wallop. The tension and suspense really veer up in the last third of the book and make it hard to put down. The final chapters are jolting, moving, and left me wanting more. "Hellfire" is definately a book horror readers - or mystery readers, for that matter - shouldn't pass up.
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