Customer Reviews

Neverland

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Clegg does it again. He is one of the most consistently effective horror writers I have ever read. In Never Land, we meet cousins Beau and Sumter summering at their grandmother's home on Gull Island. While the grown-ups drink and fight amongst themselves, the kids explore the island in search of adventure. Unfortunately, Sumter isn't exactly the most mentally healthy child, and he drags his cousins into some bizarre, frightening and dangerous games in his secret hideaway called Neverland. Communicating with another world, Sumter calls forth evil forces that threaten to destroy the family and the island. In the process, family secrets are dragged into the open, and Beau finds himself as the single person who may be able to save his family. Clegg has a knack for creating believable child characters who act in ways and say things that you would expect from a child. I absolutely could not put this book down until I finished it. It's creepy, suspenseful, and wickedly fun to read. Do what you must to track down these out-of-print Clegg novels; you won't be disappointed.

I'm a sucker for coming of age stories, where the main character (usually a young boy) steps out of childhood to enter manhood through a series of traumatic events that will leave him changed forever. This is exactly what happens to Beau in Douglas Clegg's brilliantly imaginative Neverland, a book that will leave you breathless and in complete awe.

Beau, his parents, his infant brother and his twin sisters leave for their annual summer trip down to the family island, where they will stay with Beau's aunt and her family and his grandmother for the following month. When he arrives, his cousin Sumter is already waiting for him. Sumter is a strange boy who has discovered something magical and yet terrifying in the old shack behind the house. A crate with something - or someone - trapped inside. Something that calls itself Lucy.

Soon enough, Beau finds himself trapped in a nightmare he can't get himself out of. They nickname the shack Neverland, the place where imagination runs free, a place where pain and sadness does not exist. But Neverland grows to be an entity of its own, and it wants something more than mere company. It wants blood.

Douglas Clegg's imgination is amazing, and he puts it to full use in this book. The things we used to dream as children - both good dreams and nightmares - come alive in this book. You soon find yourself trapped in playground from hell, where there are very few rules.

Beau will have to face his own personal demons as he will be pushed to the very limits of sanity by Sumter and Neverland. The last 150 pages of the book are a real roller coster ride, where everything goes to hell, and where Clegg really shows how great and brilliant his imagination truly is.

Not only is Neverland a great horror novel, it is one you won't soon forget. Douglas Clegg is the master of suspense, no dout about it. So do yourself a favor and pick on of his book up. I promise, you won't be disappointed.

Douglas Clegg is a master of fantasy and imagination. THIS plot is nothing simple; it turns out to be creative ,and unpredictable as hell, and I stand with applause for the hours he must have spent brainstorming this one.

Neverland is fun, twisted, gripping. I fell in love with the characters, I weeped with them, I feared for them. The setting with the old house, the creepy shack, the woods - all amazing, beautiful, unnerving. The pace is quick when it should be, slower when its appropriate, and overall ends with a stunning conclusion. Clegg writes with a hand that holds talent, knowing how to work its stuff.

Read Neverland for a good time, an imaginative roll in the hay. You won't be dissapointed.

Other reviews before this one have summarized the plot better than I can, but in a nutshell, the book is about creepy children. Creepy, creepy children. Beau (a bit creepy) and his sisters (not so creepy) visit their grandmother (kind of creepy in her own right) on Gull Island every summer. Their cousin Sumter (way creepy) visits at the same time. Beau and Sumter form a friendship mostly based on their secret place, Neverland, where they perform rituals and play increasingly bizarre games, and where Sumter grows ... well ... creepier and creepier.
This novel was chilling and very good. I'll admit, I'm a sucker for creepy-children-coming-of-age-stories, and this one does not disappoint. Sumter is an absolute little freak, so if you also like creepy children stories, then Sumter is your boy. A very worthy addition to the creepy, out-of-control children sub-genre of horror stories.

A story about two related families meeting together in the summer at a legendary Gull Island in the south. The protagonist is a child Beau, and tells of the stories kids play when they are young. And the stories are realistic and mean; killing rats, stealing, swearing, smoking and drinking a beer. These are all things many of us have done when we were kids, stealing a cigarette from your parents, et cetera, but they are not usually described in books. So this made for a believable story as the children get into trouble in their fort called Neverland, and spearheaded by the kid Sumter.

Not only are the kids believable, so is the setting. Douglas really comes up with a good believable background to Gull Island, and brings in a local character Julianne who is a Gullah. I have no idea if a Gullah is real or not but I believed it, and her background which is similar to a New Orleans' type of background. Supposedly they know voodoo.. Anyway, considering these strong setting and believable characters I thought it started off a little slow, but when the supernatural elements started kicking in, and especially the last 150 or so pages, I started turning the pages faster and faster as the book went along. Overall I've read better Clegg books, but this was still a real good book. Spooky..

Clegg certainly knows the innocence of child's mind and also the dark fantasies they all possesse at one point too. This book was definitely the best I've read in a long time. Clegg's best.

Note: This review was originally published on Red Adept Reviews on May 27, 2011.

Overall: 5 stars

Plot/Storyline: 5 stars

Don't be fooled by the presence of illustrations--this was most assuredly not a book to read to your young children at bedtime. It was a horror story about the summer "vacation from hell" taken by two families on a little spit of land called Gull Island on the Georgia Coast.

Every August, Rowena ("Grammy Weenie") Wandigaux Lee's two daughters--Evelyn and Cricket--and their families spent the month of August visiting her. It was a dysfunctional family to begin with, and one with a shocking secret, but little did anyone expect that this vacation would end as it did.

As the situation deteriorated and scary things were happening, Grammy Weenie understood that an old family secret was coming back to haunt everyone.

There were a number of sub-storylines, some of them red herrings, that added mystery and local color to the story.

This was a scary book, not one you would want to read late at night when you're alone in an old house that makes creaking noises. I've read scarier books, but not very many.

Characters: 5 stars

Beau and Sumter were cousins. Sumter was an only child, but Beau had two sisters and a baby brother. Beau's twin sisters Nonie and Missy were a couple of years older than him, and they wanted only to watch TV, go to the nearby beach, and go shopping. But Beau and Sumter were more adventurous than the girls. Sumter felt an inexplicably strong pull to investigate an old abandoned shed near Grammy Weenie's house, despite being told by her to stay away from it.

What Sumter and Beau found in the old shed changed their lives, and the lives of every family member, forever.

The plot had everything to do with the family's history. The author did a nice job of gradually revealing the family's past, like peeling the layers of an onion one at a time. Only at the climax did everything fall into place.

Writing style: 5 stars

The story was narrated by Beau, the ten-year-old son of one of Grammy Weenie's two daughters.

As with many horror stories, things started out pleasantly enough, but went steadily downhill, gradually ratcheting up the horror factor. What I liked about the author's style was that I never knew for sure if the bad things that were happening were in the characters' minds, like a mass hallucination, or if everything was real. Even the kids weren't sure, and their parents were too self-absorbed (and drunk much of the time) to pay attention until it was too late.

Editing: 5 stars

I found very few typos. The Kindle formatting was good, although paragraphs were needlessly separated by line spaces. The table of contents was hot-linked, which was a nice touch.

It's a hot and humid Georgia summer, and 10 year old Beau Jackson and his family have made their annual journey to the summer retreat of Gull Island. (Gull Island is not really an island, it's a peninsula, but like the name of Gull Island, not everything is like it seems.) Beau's family stays in the old home still occupied by his grandmother and they're joined by his aunt and his odd cousin Sumter. The Jacksons seem like a typical albeit somewhat dysfunctional Southern American family, but that doesn't take long to change. As Beau and Sumter begin spending time in a run down little garden shack which contains a presence which Sumter names "Lucy," what starts out as innocent childhood fantasies slowly turns into something much more diabolical.

Neverland is an intense read. Douglas Clegg does a masterful job of capturing the feel of a hot Georgia summer. I felt the humidity and the stale smell of the old decaying swamps nearby. The picture Clegg paints of the out-of-favor tourist retreat is a vivid one and I had no problems picturing my childhood self running barefoot down scrubby sidewalks on the streets of Gull Island.

The way Clegg deals with tension in Neverland is a story in and of itself. Tension rises sharply and then drops suddenly, over and over. If it were a roller coaster ride, I would have already shared my breakfast with the people sitting next to me. At first I found this story style hard to get used to. I kept thinking "How many rugs does Clegg have, and how many times will he pull one out from under my feet?" About midway through the story it became apparent that the tactic was intentional. The attention span of a 10 year old, even one in terror, is short-lived. Once everything was deemed ok, the kids were quick to move on to the next thing. Each event built a little on the last, finally concluding into a crescendo of violence and terror. The story itself reads almost like a Young Adult novel, and at first I thought that was what I was going to get. That is, until the f-bombs were dropped, and the trailer trash started showing some nipple.

The characters of Neverland were also colorful and engaging. Clegg either has some southern ties, or has spent a serious amount of time around southern folk. The southern cultural touches stay consistent through the whole book. The cast stayed small, so the reader gets to know each character intimately. The only ones that were left out were Beau's sisters, who remained off to the side for the majority of the plot.

I found Neverland, which would be marketed as dark fantasy or horror, to be a nice diversion from what I typically read. Although I was not disturbed by much in the book, I did find it intense and creepy. I'm not sure if that says more about me, and what kinds of things don't scare me, or if I just felt too separated from the things going on in the story. Old veterans of horror will enjoy the read, but are not likely to find it any more or less scary than your average horror tale.

But it's not the scare factor that makes Neverland special -- it's how the story is told. Clegg's masterful weaving of reality and imagination through the mind of a child leaves you unsure of what's the product of an overactive imagination or actually something evil. You truly get a feel for what Beau is going through with the moral ambiguity that can only come from 10 year old boys. I highly recommend you give Neverland a try. Its unique voice is something to be experienced and it will appeal to horror and fantasy fans both

-FanLit

Beauragard Jackson has been visiting his grandmother's small house on Gull Island for years, along with his family, including his sisters and cousin, Sumter. And, like most kids, he wishes he were somewhere else. His grandmother's blantantly racists remarks and old-fashioned styles of disiplining, combined with the drunken escapades of his older relatives make for a rather unpleasent vacationing experience. Soon, however, things take an interesting turn when the little cabin the children have escaped to becomes something sinister, Sumter creating an imaginary "Lucy" to go alongside this Neverland. In addition, Beau and Sumter somehow form a telepathic connection. During all this, power is distributed and, as we all know, power leads to Plot.

The first thing, the most obvious thing, about Neverland is the atmosphere. Immediately chilling, almost heartless, as life in the eyes of a child tend to be. If there's only one thing to say of Clegg's writing, its that he knows how to set a mood. The realistic and fantastical intertwined dangerously between the "base" of Neverland. Its kind of like these two opposite ends of the spectrum--harsh reality and childish, sometimes cruel escapism.

Every character is, again, seen through a child's eye, which is a nice way of saying big, bumbling cartoons. The only people really explored on is Beau and Sumter, which makes sense, I suppose, since they're really the main focus points. As Sumter becomes more and more psycho, Beau is realistically torn--he is disgusted with his cousin's actions, but at the same time, he understands them. In a way, so do I, which I think is Clegg's greatest acheivment; there are no villains, even through the black-and-white perspective of Beau, and there are no heroes (but are there ever in horror?). Anyone whos been young, I think, can understand Sumter. There's that casual cruelty that all kids develop as protection against a world bigger and scarier then them, as well as the need for escape, no matter how frightening. Oftentimes, these observations were stunningly insightful, offering a clear view of how our enviroment effects our actions and how our actions effect our enviorment. So, good on you.

Clegg once again writes a novel about the loss of innocence through disturbing events with insight, vulgerity and straight up skills, man. I will definetly be keeping an eye on this guy, and ya'll should too (try to ignore the incoherency of this review).

Rating: 8 out of 10--leaning heavily towards a 9, but the beginning kind of lagged.

And in this story everything does. Douglas Clegg really did a magnificent job recalling what it was like to be a kid with an imagination.

He takes the story of boy who gets wrapped up in the magical world of his cousin, Sumter, while on summer vacation. Every kid has secrets, and the ones his cousin has are more than just a child's overblown imagination.

The character of Sumter also makes one think of what serial killers are like as children. I don't know if that's what Clegg had in mind when he wrote this, but it becomes obvious as the book progresses.

The writing has a breezy poetry to it, and the pages start flying once you get into this story. If you loved books like, Lansdale's The Bottoms, or McCammon's Boy's Life, you'll find yourself reading into the darkest hours of night with this one.

This was Clegg's third novel, and it reads like it was his tenth. You can see his writing ability thrive even this far back in his writing career.

Spooky, weird, surreal and intense storytelling, make this one no fan of Horror-or just good writing-should miss out on.