Customer Reviews

Midnight Picnic

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I recently discovered nick antosca when a website compared his first book Fires to early bret easton ellis novels (and b.e.e. is my favorite author) so I thought I would check it out. Especially since bret takes so damn long to write a new book. Anyway, Fires was one of those books that I could not put down that made me simultaneously wish what I was reading was turned into a really good indie movie and also just be so excited that what was written was so gripping and entertaining that I was even more content by the fact it was taking place in a book.

Needless to say, nick has far out done himself with midnight picnic. I am not even going to try to give a summary of the plot, because I feel like that would not do the book justice. I recommend it to people who like things dark and creepy with a very unsettling yet strangely comfortable mood. This is very different from Fires, but in my opinion it's even better. Nick is definitely a writer that I plan to follow from now on and I really hope he has a very fruitful and successful career.

Movies, music, and tv shows are great but for your dollar, books are still the best form of escapism. Especially for how things are nowadays. Please do yourself a favor and check out this book so you can enjoy something that's different and unique and utterly fascinating.

"Bram pulls into the parking lot half asleep and the crunch of gravel under his tires becomes the crunch of bones. Something screams."

These two introductory sentences, regular compound and micro, foreshadow much of what's to come in Antosca's dark story of a lonely man's vigilante misadventure into dimensions of ghosts, superimposed onto dim/glowing landscapes of strip malls and blackberry trails.

Juxtaposed: bone-chilling images borrowed from monstrous childhood nightmares and innocence invoking sympathy from tragic events--ravaging mortality into realms of complacent immortality.

From the beginning, to "Midnight Picnic"'s compelling back-seat journey into a satisfying conclusion, Bram's indignant obligation to find a child killer and destroy him is a fantastic ride into the unknown.

Midnight Picnic is GUD contributor Nick Antosca's second novel, but is written with such assurance and skill that it might more easily be his twenty-second. On the first page, Antosca draws the reader in to unwilling protagonist Bram's world, which is about to get uncannily strange.

Bram's living a mundane, drab existence over a bar called Moms until the night he comes home tired and accidentally runs over the bar's dog, Baby. His attempts to succour the injured animal show him to be basically decent, but ineffectual. He wants to do the right thing, yet gives up when it becomes too difficult. This is the issue Bram will have to face up to as the story continues.

The skeleton of a young boy is found, and his spirit makes a connection with Bram that takes him on a nightmare journey into the land of the dead. Here, he learns far more about himself--and the dead and living--than he ever thought possible. However, at heart, Midnight Picnic is not a ghost story. It's a tale of redemption and the healing effects of time.

The central premise is that, given time to reflect, we can all come to a realisation of where we have gone wrong in our lives. No matter how despicable our crimes, redemption is possible, but it comes not from outside, but from the person themselves, from their changed relationship with themselves and the other dead. It's a powerful message in a book that refuses to label anyone as evil.

Only Adam is depicted as incapable of this process, perhaps because he died too young. For him, time to reflect has only bred hatred; he is locked into childish ideas of right, wrong, and punisment.

All Antosca's characters are vividly realised, from Bram's lost soul of an on-off girlfriend to the old man who lives in the woods, and has, in the past, done whatever it took to stay hidden there. Before vengeance comes for him, he seems to have already learnt his lesson, telling another intruder on his solitude, "I wouldn't do anything to you...".

This book is relatively short, but the reader needn't feel short-changed. There's a complete story here, one that compels as well as entertains. It's fascinating to travel with Bram and Adam into the lands of the dead, a place into which the living often stray, unawares, a land that's depicted as chillingly as the dead landscape of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

An excellent book to read on Halloween, with your head under the covers and a heavy flashlight handy.

[Review written by Debbie Moorhouse for GUD Magazine]

In many ways a good short book is better than a good long book, and this is a case in point. Antosca is a very talented writer and his story is both classic and original. It's the sort of thing Stephen King wishes he could write. Highly recommended.

I have never been met with a book that has so commanded the attention of all of my senses at once. Antosca masterfully combines haunting images with unexpected tastes and smells, the memorable senses, and these stay with the reader through the book. He keeps the reader completely submerged in this synethesia, whether through the taste of berries, the smell of fruit, the crunch of gravel, what have you. His prose is dry, eloquent, simple in its working the way that any master at work can seem simple.

Beyond technique, Antosca has created an American afterlife that is unbeatable in its science, it rings true as an extension of reality, as if there could be no other way. And this knowledge weighs on the reader like the weight of a lungful of water.

Writing is stronger than Fires but the intense, adderall-tinged orange tempo is still there. Midnight Picnic is a book that thinks its a movie, I couldn't put it down. A strange, strange book yet full of pathos. Read it on drugs!

This is a novel about a dead little boy who asks a living person to help him get revenge on his killer. There are monster dogs and drownings and burning shacks in the woods. There is a strip club in New Orleans. It ends in Audubon Park. In Atlantic City, the dead boy looks for the ocean.

The best place to buy Midnight Picnic is directly from the publisher, at the Word Riot website. Word Riot dot org. Support independent publishing, not the Amazon s*******k.