Night Games [Hardcover]

Marilyn Harris (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Harris (The Portent, The Diviner has orchestrated another chilling tale in this story of Zoe Manning, wife and mother, who, at the age of 32, is still repressing memories of her painful childhood. Reliving the past is far from her mind as Zoe drops her husband and sons off at Boston's Logan airport for their one-week vacation, a time she has decided to keep for herself to clean up her deserted family home in New Hampshire. Leaving the airport she meets a former high-school classmate, cheerful, persuasive Mary Lisa, who urges her to join in a party for a theatrical troop at Mary's home in Marblehead that evening. Zoe reluctantly accepts, and slowly, with gradual awareness, she finds herself drawn into a horrifying week of bizarre bondage and captivity during which she experiences recurrent visions of the past: her innocent tryst with a young classmate; the chronic, drunken rages of her abusive father; the suicides of both of her parents. Is the grotesque group of actors basically malevolent or do they have another purpose in mind? And do they exist at all? The Zoe who picks up her family at the airport one week later is radically altered. This brisk novel is a heady mix of the psychological and the occult.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Random House Value Publishing (June 19, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0517053306
• ISBN-13: 978-0517053300
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Archetypal and Terrifying, August 12, 2009

By 

Purple Bird - See all my reviews

This review is from: Night Games (Mass Market Paperback)

Last week I was cleaning out my back shelf of books and picked several to re-read, not having remembered any of them.

Night Games was a very lucky choice on my part. My copy was published in 1987 and the pages were getting quite dark. I began the first three pages, wondering if I would get absorbed into the story...and two days later I breathlessly finished the stunning last words.

Archetypal and terrifying, this highly creative story tells of one woman's journey into herself - and beyond. Never in control and never alone, she must undergo an extraordinary set of circumstances which will eventually strip her to her psychological and physical core. I believe that her primordial screams will ring in the reader's mind long after the last page is turned.

Okay, I really hate writing synopsis, but since there are no other reviews for this amazing book, as my African Gray would say, `Heeeeer we go!"

Zoe Manning is a dishrag of a woman. Her disrespectful husband and bratty two young sons are off to visit their in-laws and Zoe has somehow found the strength to remain behind for the week in order to see to her childhood house which has been standing neglected ever since her parents committed suicide some years earlier. Zoe intends to confront her ghosts, but the "ghosts" have beaten her to the punch and proceed to drag her through a wild maze of a thrill ride, beginning with a hellish party with no limits and culminating in an "actor's play" about the abuse and trauma that she had carried and buried within herself all along. Zoe is forced to see exactly who and what she is, if not the wild group of actors who act as puppeteers for the nightmare week that ensues.

I would highly recommend this novel for those who enjoy psychological terror. There are not too many copies of this out-of-print book around, and those who get a chance to read it won't regret it.