Customer Reviews

In the Night Season: A Novel

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3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Although I must admit to a bias toward Richard Bausch's work (he was my fiction writing professor in college), I enjoyed In The Night Season. For veteran Bausch readers, it is quite a departure from previous novels, although not an unpleasant one. This novel has plenty of action and a suspenseful storyline however the denouement was predictable. I do appreciate Bausch's efforts to forge into uncharted territory however.

I had read the book of Bausch's short stories and was impressed. However, this novel was absolutely first rate. He manages to hold the tension in the book right up to the epilogue. I love authors who fully develop their characters, and Bausch is a master of that, even in a suspense novel. As a writer I always read with one eye on the craft of the novel.
This was like seeing a movie that had you on the edge of your seat the whole time. I plan to read lots more by this author.

"With IN THE NIGHT SEASON, Bausch weds a plot with all the pulse-racing suspense of a popular crime novel to a sensitive limning of two recurrent themes in his recent work: the rivulets causing family love to wander off course and the reaction of ordinary people to extraordinary dangers....Richard Bausch has long been one of the most expert and substantial of our writers. And his talent is long overdue for wider recognition." --Boston Globe

The terrors of "The Night Season" have their source in a vulnerability of modern life. Families broken by death, divorce and infidelity are left exposed to the brutalities that lie in wait "out there." Bausch has written his most compelling plot without sacrificing his extraordinary genius in developing the lives and motivations of characters with whom you grow to understand as deeply as your own self. This novel is as frightening as any Steven King book without the manipulation. This book makes you confront the night season that resides within as well as without.

I thought this was a great book. As far as mysteries and thrillers go, this one kept me up all night. The characters were realistic and you could keep track of it. It was a great book. I'm looking into other books by Bausch now. I just discovered him after reading Stephen King's book On Writing.

"IN THE NIGHT SEASON falls into the realm of traditional American romanticism, a vector that reaches from Hemingway to Dickey's DELIVERANCE to Stone's DOG SOLDIERS to Pinckney Benedict's flamboyant DOGS OF GOD. As in these novels, SEASON's characters inhavit the rural wilderness, wehre they find that the true threat to their well-being isn't the savagery of nature, but the brutality of the human heart. What distinguishes Bausch's novel from its predecessors is that the heroic protagonists aren't rough-hewn monosyllabic men, but a seemingly helpless widow and her young son. . . .A captivating story with admirable emotional resonance." --The Sun Sentinell, Ft. Lauderdale

This reading experience was a dissappointment. While the tight writing keeps the reader's interest, the people do not. Bausch, who is capable of drawing a reader into incredibly complex ethical situations, does none of that here. And, while we can all get at least a little excited about pure mayhem, this unrelieved hostage tale provides no such excitement. No moral tension, because there are no moral people. Just grossly denegrating behavior--homosexual rape of an eleven year old, illicit fingering of his mom, violent deaths---why? No, I cannot recommend this one even though I very much admire the author's ability, in his short fiction, to place the reader in a specific part of the human experiment with stories that haunt.

I have read all of Richard Bausch's books and consider him one of the finest of contemporary novelists; in particular, his The Last Good Time is a small masterpiece. Why, then, has he sunk so low with Night Season? Is it his hope to strike it rich in Hollywood? In piling up cliches, one-dimensional caricatures, and blood and gore galore, does he think he has penned a bestseller that cries out for movie treatment? Had he developed instead the interracial and political extremism themes he posed at the beginning of this novel, the project could have been deeply moving. Instead, he patronizes the psychological thriller, for which he has no apparent skill. The result is more than 300 pages in which nothing much happens: two endless hostage situations, repeated escapes leading nowhere, modest flashbacks that never bring the protagonists alive, and constant doses of repellent violence that serve no purpose other than manipulation of the reader. I suggest that readers who are looking for excitement in crime novels turn instead to George Dawes Green's superlative The Caveman's Valentine, to Michael Connolly's rich Harry Bosch novels (and not to that author's overwritten departures from Bosch), to Philip Finch's insanely devious Paradise Junction, to Andrew Klavan's high-tension True Crime, and to James Gabriel Berman's eerie Uninvited. But at all costs ignore Bausch's pathetic attempt to explore territory that until now he has fortunately left to those with the talents necessary to the genre.

While I found parts of this book gripping, I wouldn't say it was because I cared about any of the hostages, three long-suffering people who'd been beaten down by life and were therefore passive in the face of fear. In fact, one of the most interesting characters was cruel Travis, who enjoyed using his charm to get to know his victims. Travis seemed to understand Jason better after only a short time than Mr. Bishop or either of Jason's parents. Some of the most tense scenes in the novel were when the hostages had to wait to find out what the bad guys were going to do to them. The passivity of the characters was compounded by the fact that none of them knew anything about what the criminals were looking for, and wasted a lot of dialogue repeating that fact. I was glad when the torture was over so I could put the book down, but I felt that Bausch left too much out in his attempt to maximize the suspense in this novel.

This is a very well-written thriller, but it brings nothing new to the genre. I can't complain about the prose, which is full and efficient. I wish Richard Bausch would stick with short stories, or at least stories with gentler and less generic themes.