Customer Reviews

Lost Boys

5 star:		(80)
4 star:		(32)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(23)
1 star:		(27)

 

 

Every so often I see a film or read a book that 'disturbs' me for several days. Symptoms including a dazed/off-center mental state and a distraction from 'reality' possessed me in the days after seeing. 'Schindler's List', 'The Sixth Sense', and reading Malachi Martin's 'Hostage to the Devil'. This 'disturbance' has its good and bad qualities. Best of all, it is stimulating, helps clear my mind and provoke deep thoughts. So I was surprised when 'Lost Boys' affected me the same way.

If you're a parent, this book will disturb you in many ways. OSC puts in writing every nightmare a parent has over the sanity and safety of his/her kids--- kids getting lost, adjustment problems at a new school and town, creepy people whom you're not quite sure to trust your kids with, the evils of computer/video games, child predators...

On a par with 'Ender's Game', 'Lost Boys' has good plot and fine 3-D characters. For you Ender fans, OSC spins a different kind of story here---one about the mundane issues of everyday family life. However, as you turn the pages, you care more and more about what happens to the family, while suspense and creepiness build higher and higher. Card skillfully moves the story and mood along. You also get an interesting and frank look at husband-wife relationship dynamics that portrayed each's side very well.

Some OSC readers (or the uninitiated) may criticize the way he weaves 'Mormonness' into his work. I always found the tie-in of his Faith to his books as interesting and informative adjuncts to his story, and not as 'missionary work' for his Church. 'Lost Boys' is no exception. Faith and Family are important elements of this story, and Card gives us a little more than a peek at what Life-As-a-Mormon is all about.

I agree in part with the reviewer who loved all but the ending. True, the pace is sluggish for the first half, and then increases steadily. The ending comes hard and with a jolt.

But that's not all bad. Because at the end, that 'disturbed' feeling hit me, and I reflected long and hard about things I hadn't seriously thought about before.

I'm not a science fiction fan, so I almost missed this one. But having read another Card book (Saints), I took a chance on this one, and I'm very glad I did. I read Lost Boys about two years ago, and I'd read it again if I thought I could handle it. It's a beautiful story of a family being subjected to terrible hardship and stress, a family whose faith and love strengthen and keep them together through the worst kind of sorrow. A word of caution: if you have ever buried one of your children (as I have), be careful with this one. You don't have to be a Mormon to enjoy this novel. The doctrine is presented as part of the story, it's easy to understand. The plot is rather complicated, but basically concerns a recently relocated software designer and his family who find themselves facing religious prejudice, serious problems with the husband's new employer, self-righteous busybodies, a severly disabled newborn, and a serial killer. All at the same time. They are blessed with a truly exceptional eldest child, Steven, who seems to be a conduit of supernatural forces. Yes, the ending is wrenching, and yes, you will cry, but that is the essence of life, isn't it? If you want to escape to a place where all the endings are happy, don't read this book. If you want to experience a slice of Mormon theology mixed with suspense and tragedy, then don't miss this one. You'll find yourself counting your blessings and hugging your children a little more tightly afterwards. I'm glad I read Lost Boys, and I recommend it to anyone with an open mind and a tender heart.

That's how I felt when I finished THE LOST BOYS. I've read O.S. Card's Earth series, his Alvin series, the Ender series, even Stone Tables, but nothing prepared me for this seemingly lighthearted tale of a Mormon family. Like others before me, I recommend that you save a large block of time for reading the last 100 pages--you won't want to put it down. Yes, you have to meander to get to the end, but it is a pleasureable journey, getting to know Step, Deanna, and the kiddies. Just when you think you've figured out the bad guy, WHAM! you get blindsided by what feels like a freight train. For days, I was shell-shocked. I shared the book with my teenage son (a Stevie-like boy who reads far too much to often be impressed by a book), and he had the same reaction. To be kind, we shared it with his father who called our son "Stevie" while reading it and could only hug him and cry when he finished the story. Then we shared it with a best friend who wouldn't speak to us for days after having her heart broken. Read it and weep! It is the most disturbing book I've ever read, but sometimes it's good to have your emotions shaken!

I have never been so profoundly affected by a book before in my life. Each member of this Mormon family comes alive and Card makes you love each one of them. I read chapters of this book while holding my breath between pages! The book captures the evils that we all encounter in our everyday lives. I worried about the oldest son, Stevie, when he went to school and about the father at work every day. The book is very spiritual and I would not classify it as fantasy. The small details about the Mormon religion were fascinating and inspiried me to read a book by a former Mormon after finishing Lost Boys. The ending is unbearably sad but also uplifting. I read the last chapter with tears streaming down my face and finished the book sobbing uncontrollably. I couldn't really regain my composure the rest of the evening and the book will always remain with me. I think that parents will be especially affected by the story of this family.

Normally I wouldn't chime in with yet another review where so many exist, but my viewpoint is somewhat different from those I have read, somewhere in the middle between loving and hating this book, and for different reasons than other reviewers that I've read. Let me say at the outset that I have read a number of Card's other books, though far from all, and generally enjoyed them, still have a few on the "to-be-read" [someday]list.

On the negative side, I find the style of writing in "Lost Boys" quite annoying. Card has never been a great stylist, merely servicable, and I suppose this is his attempt at "best seller" writing, but it grates and almost made me stop reading. Imagine that person everyone seems to know, the chatterbox: charming perhaps but a thought cannot enter her head without making its way out past the lips. Conversation (or really mono-versation) is a steady stream-of-consciousness verbalization, a form of mind-dump, jumping at each loosely connected thread branching off from what is being talked about. "Lost Boys" commits to paper this style, and though it makes good practice for speed reading one wants to say "Stick to the point! Get on with it!"

I also agree with those who find DeAnne a puzzling and annoying character, frightened of everything, germs, dirt, animals, molesters, communists in the washroom. Are we supposed to find her an attractive and reasonable woman? I could not imagine life with her, either as husband or child.

The cutesy family banter also grates, repeatedly and explained at great length (telling us,rather than showing us, where it's from). Somehow it seems unnatural, sort of <cute family> ... <\cute family> mode.

The horror/supernatural angle that seems to actually define the rest of the book seems kind of tacked-on, barely hinted at until the last few pages, though I suspect that it was actually the core of the original short story (which I haven't read) and it's really all the rest that was added. It seems very clumsily integrated with the novel as a whole. This is the story of Step and DeAnne's eldest boy, Stevie, and it is the most focussed of the several threads, but this is what should have been fleshed out; as it is, it seems an afterthought.

On the plus side, the depiction of Mormon life that many find objectionable is half the interest the book holds for me. I've known for many years that Card is Mormon, but this background appears tangentially if at all in the other books of his I've read. It's fascinating to get a picture of the day-to-day workings of a Mormon community embedded in a typical American town. (I do wonder though that the existence of this community is never discussed as a reason for Step and DeAnne moving to Steuben, when it certainly must have figured into his already difficult search for employment).

Another theme is Steps's work in software (specifically game) development. I've done enough programming, and read about and known enough people very like those at Eight Bits Inc., complete with the wacko goings on that make the experience so horrific for Fletch, that Card's descriptions sound as if he's had experience. Step's former free lance software life (remembered as idyllic) must resonate with Card's own writing lifestyle.

There are moments of good writing. p. 96: "Those were the days of Step Fletcher, and he hated his life and his job even though he loved his family and his work."

So, (* + 5*), shift right one bit, call it 3*.

Here's a Halloween read that I'd bet you don't have on your list, and yet, you absolutely should, must, will check it out. Because it embodies the heart and soul of the season's spirit. A ghost story, a supernatural thriller, with no gore, no horror fest over-the-top violence (actually almost no violence at all), and yet it creeps into your heart, stirs your senses more violently than a pitcherful of tequila shots (if they're even drunk in pitchers, as if I'd know) and does to you what only the finest fiction aspires to achieve: it leaves you moved almost to the point of tears, and so satisfied, you turn the last page immensely sad, and yet immensely content.

Now, let's talk about M. Night Shyamalan.

If M. Night Shyamalan ever makes a sequel to The Sixth Sense, he should seriously consider adapting Lost Boys. The very fact that Lost Boys was first published way back in 1992, years before Shyamalan made his dazzling debut that shot to the top of the biggest all-time grossers in Hollywood history, makes me wonder for a moment. Could it be that the talented young Indian American director (his first name is 'Manoj' and he was born in Chennai, formerly called Madras) actually read Lost Boys in its first publication? Because, if he didn't, then the 'twist in the tale' of both The Sixth Sense and Lost Boys is more than amazing; it's close to supernatural!

Well, Shyamalan is certainly talented enough to have come up with his zinger of a 'twist' entirely on his own, and his stately, sedate pacing, masterful direction, and superbly nuanced screenplay certainly made The Sixth Sense way more than a clever-idea film. But it's hard to believe that Lost Boys essayed an eeirily similar plot device, and did so years before Shyamalan's movie, and had no influence at all upon that standout film.

Since I certainly don't know what did or didn't influence Shyamalan--for all I know, he's never even read an Orson Scott Card book in his life, I can only muse on that a moment, and then move on. Because it's enough to know that Lost Boys existed before The Sixth Sense and that it exists even now, in a reissued paperback edition along with a number of Orson Scott Card's other highly readable backlist novels.

The reason for the reissue, presumably, is a change of publishers or a lapsing of rights. But there's also Card's new novel, Magic Street. Card is best known as the author of the Ender series of thoughtful science fiction novels, the linked Shadow series, and probably less-well known but equally loved for his Tales of Alvin Maker series of marvelous, magical alternate history novels. But what most SF readers don't know is that he's also the author of some wonderfully written, genuinely moving, and eeirily effective supernatural suspense novels.

Lost Boys is part of this lesser known genre that Card has worked in over the years, but found little success in, compared to his SF novels at least. (Each instalment of the Shadow series has hit the New York Times Bestseller lists like clockwork and won him a whole new generation of young readers who weren't even in boxers when the Ender novels first came out. That situation might change now, with the publication of Magic Street, which, though I've read only a couple of chapters of so far, seems to be a wonderful urban fantasy, and happily, seems to be doing much better on the sales charts as well.

Lost Boys isn't your typical supernatural novel. It's definitely not a horror novel, by any stretch of the genre imagination. There's no violence in it, no explicit horror, and almost all the tension and suspense comes from the conflicts and crises faced by the characters in their everyday lives. In this sense it reminds of the excellent suspense thrillers of Douglas Kennedy, especially The Job and The Big Picture both of which rely more on the daily work-and-relationship problems of their protagonists rather than John Grisham-type mega-million dollar stakes or mafia assassins or any of the usual suspense thriller fight-or-flight devices. (Although, Kennedy's novels have plenty of violence, as well as fight and flight both!)

On the surface, it's a deceptively simple book. Card even starts each chapter with nursery rhyme-like opening sentences...

"This is the car they drove..."

"This is the house they moved into..."

"This is the company where Step worked..."

...and so on right to the last chapter (which starts thus:

"This is how the Fletchers found their way to the end of 1983..."

This is a novel about a family. Step Fletcher, his pregnant wife DeAnne, and their three children move to Steuben, North Carolina, because that's the only place where he's been able to get a job after his royalty income from the bestselling computer game he designed slows to a trickle. The job is with a small computer software firm whose sole claim to fame and success is a word processing program. Step is heavily under-employed here, a brilliant game programmer forced to take this humiliating middling-pay job in order to support his family through this financial crisis. (It's 1983. There's a recession on.) The job turns out to be an awful one; his boss is an ass, his department head is literally a Dick, and the only friend he gets along with there, a young, brilliant programmer who's really the talent powering the engine of the firm, is possibly a child molestor who all but begs Step to let him babysit his children. As if.

DeAnne isn't have it much easier. Managing three small kids, an advanced pregnancy, and the inevitable difficulties to settling into a new town and house are compounded when she and Step realize that their oldest child, 8-year old Stevie, is having a really hard time at his new school. If they believe Stevie's version, then his class teacher is a real monster, his classmates are mean country brats, and even his straight-A record isn't likely to save him from flunking the year.

No wonder then that Stevie starts imagining fictitious playmates to spend his free time with, shunning his little kid brother and sister, and, after a while, even his mother and father. Of course, it takes them a long while to realize that he's telling the truth about how awful his teacher really is, and about those invisible 'friends'. It takes them even longer to understand that those 'friends' are really boys more or less his own age who went missing and are suspected to be the victims of a serial child-killer. By then of course, it's much too late.

Now, the important thing to know about Lost Boys is that despite its quite routine story premise, it isn't written like a Christopher Golden or like most similar novels. On the contrary. Not once do we see the killer's point of view, or even Stevie's. Well, except for the very first chapter, more of a prologue really--but at that point, we don't know whose point of view it is, and I'm sure as hell not telling you.

Almost the entire novel is divided between Step Fletcher's point of view and DeAnne Fletcher's point of view. The daily problems of Step's struggle to retain his dignity at his humiliating job while trying to find an escape route that will enable him to come out of his financial bind without losing the company medical insurance he needs so badly for DeAnne's pregnancy, DeAnne's artful and stressfull managing of the household, three kids, Stevie's problems at school, Step's late hours and work tension, her pregnancy, and the well-meaning but often intrusive, or downright aggressive fellow Mormons in the community, she's got a lot to juggle.

Card's strength lies in plunging us so deeply into the lives and minds and problems of his protagonists, you have to actually remind yourself that this is a supernatural suspense novel, because it reads for the most part like any good mainstream fiction. But the supernatural element is an integral part of the story, and when it finally rears its scary head, trust me, you'll find all that emotional investment in the characters' lives and job hassles to be well worth the investment, for the payoff is fantastic. I won't give away much more about the plot of Lost Boys because that twist at the end is really something to savour. Even though its terribly sad, heartbreaking, and the poignancy of the last pages lingers with you for days after you put the book down.

You should also know up front that Card is a Mormon whose books and stories are always deeply invested with his own personal, unique sense of morality. Don't worry, there's no preaching here. But yes, there is a lot of moralizing, and all of it is completely relevant and related to the characters and their situation. All the Fletcher family, kids included, are Card-carrying Mormons, you could say. (Sorry, couldn't resist that one!) And the book is all the better for it. Because its such a relief to read a good supernatural novel which isn't filled to gagging point with drunks, addicts, self-obsessed paranoics, and all those dysfunctional misfits that seem to be must-haves for most novels of this genre.

Card's Mormonism manifests itself throughout this finely crafted, heartfelt novel as a warm, humane, beautifully rendered fable about a family of five wonderful human beings struggling to maintain dignity and balance in a time of great stress and conflict. It lifts the story to a plane of moral beauty that I've not found in many novels. It reminds me of the very first Orson Scott Card novel I read, decades ago, called Hot Sleep, a thinly veiled science fiction adventure with a biblical allegory. Or even his chilling, brilliant short stories in the early collection Unaccompanied Sonata in which the original short story 'Ender's Game' first appeared, and which he later expanded to novel form to find great success.

I won't deny also that the book appealed to me, as a non-smoking, non-drinking father of two, with an amazingly similar moral outlook and that at times, I felt I was almost reading about myself and my family. And I'm a Hindu living in Mumbai, India! What I'm trying to say is that it's rare to find a good story about a good man. And Lost Boys is one such rare book. Since discovering it recently for the first time, I've quickly pounced on copies of Card's other supernatural suspense novels, Homebody, Treasure Chest and of course, Magic Street and I'll post reviews of each one here as I read it.

This is a warm, beautiful, sad, humane, and ultimately, profoundly moving novel that deserves a place on any Halloween reading list this year or any year. And, if you give it a chance, a place in your heart as well.

Orson Scott Card, best know for writing Science Fiction (Ender's Game) and Fantasy (Journeyman Alvin), took a different route with this book about an American family in the early 1980's.

The details of this story are not important. What is important, and what makes this book so wonderful, is Card's deft handling of his characters. Each character is a finely crafted player, their life laid bare before the reader. There are no secrets. This book is about a family, and about how a family deals with problems. It is about parents, and about letting your children grow up to be their own selves. It is about children, and understanding them. It is about life. It is about death.

Card has always demonstrated that rare gift of being able to write good child characters. He never talks down to children, and the parents in Lost Boys treat their children with respect, while remaining parents. They are not lax, nor are they ignorant. They are intelligent enough to trust that their children have learned well from the example set before them. And they trust in God and in their church.

The family is Mormon, and this fact, if such a thing is possible, makes the book even more fascinating for someone who is not a Mormon. The religion is treated in a remarkably even-handed manner. Never proselytizing or evangelizing, but simply showing.

In the end, Card's book is about love, about about letting go of your children and trusting them to choose what's best. It is a deeply moving book, and I always struggle through the last two chapters, fighting back the tears that blur my vision. It is a sad book, but at the same time it is so filled with joy that I feel better each time I've read it. In the end, the book is about hope and about life.

-Lewis Butler (1996)
www.nyx.net/~kreme

I never expected to find one of my favorite authors writing a horror-type novel but was pleasantly surprised by the result. Card has a way of drawing you into his characters. Not being familiar with the Mormon faith, I enjoyed the peek into their way of life that Card provided. (Despite one of the earlier reviews, the strong faith of the main characters was very important to the story and character development.) I have to confess that the revelation at the climax of the story made me actually gasp with surprise. Call me naive but I didn't see it coming. It also left me in tears. Though I never felt the chill of horror while reading this story (no book seems capable of doing that for me), I was haunted by it. Card has an interesting gift of blending sadness and hope in the same story and Lost Boys is no exception.

Over the years I have read several of Cards books. When his first stories came out I thought that I would be reading every one of them because they were so great. However, over time, I started to pick up one story after another that left me totally unsatisfied. What makes me so up-beat about Lost Boys is that it is really an adult novel that works well on several levels.

First of all, the story is very complicated. Card surrounds this premise with layer upon layer of details that you just don't ordinarily find in genre writing. This got a little long winded at times and I thought that Cards foray into Mormonism, though interesting, was way to predominant. It would have been great if he had edited it down enough so that it would have meshed nicely with the computer programing, but this is just a little bit of a nit-picking exercise on my part.

Secondly, the characters are great. They are based on himself and his family, and this really adds a level of detail that is just inspiring. I could read mundane little episodes and was just sucked into passage after passage. In a lot of ways, this story is lots of small trails that barely link together. In the end they do, like in To Kill A Mocking Bird.

Two reasons for my not giving this book five stars are that the parents a more than a little blind to some goings on of the eldest child. It was frustrating for me to see that they were not asking the right questions or any questions at all. And secondly, as I said before, at times the book slows down to the point of a stall when Card goes into just a little too much detail such as with the Mormon Church.

I think that if you like Cards work, you would really enjoy this story. Well worth picking up. Especially if you are searching for genre writing that is just a little more adult and better thought out than the usual fare.

I first started reading this book after reading Card's Ender series, craving more of whatever this gifted writer could offer.

What I found, instead, was a [profoundly] boring lead-up to the actual story. Throughout the first 100 pages or so, it boggled my mind that anyone could possibly care about reading about this family's daily struggles and activities-- cooking, working, cleaning, going to a friend's house for dinner... Can't we just do this ourselves? Can anyone possibly be that voyeuristic?

But I stuck with the book because I had faith in the writer. And my faith was not misplaced. I consider the last half of the book my treat for putting up with so much drivel in the beginning.

By the end, however, you discover that a lot of the 'drivel' was masked development and you can't simply skim through it. I finished this book three days ago, but I'm still pondering it. Few books have ever had that effect on me. And it's one of two books which made me actually cry (the other was, surprisingly, the novella 'The Body' by Stephen King). So if you're the patient type, pick up a copy of Lost Boys. If not, pass this one by.

P.S. Since so many other reviewers have mentioned the 'Mormon' part of the book, I'll just put in my two cents. You don't need to be Mormon to read this book (I'm certainly not). Just accept that this is a central part of these characters' lives. It fits within the story and I can't see any attempt on Card's part (a Mormon) to minister to the reader.