From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Dark fantasy writer Engstrom (Black Leather) starts on familiar ground, but rapidly turns this novel in stories into a genre-blending exploration of love, aging, grief and sacrifice. In Vargas County, children under 12 occasionally vanish, but the locals have long viewed this as a tithe taken by the town in exchange for the happiness of the other residents. This theme is explored directly in stories like House Odds, in which real estate agent Julia has to decide if her grandchildren would be in greater danger in town or away with their drunken father. Other tales merely use the disappearances as a backdrop, such as Skytouch Fever, in which aging Sadie Katherine is forced to choose between her steadfast beau and a rakish visitor, and the wittily ironic thriller One Quiet Evening in the Wax Museum. Fast-paced, melancholy and beautiful, the overarching narrative binds a collection of good stories into a superb if unconventional novel. (Aug.)
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Engstrom, a skilled horror fiction stylist whose novels include the biographical Lizzie Borden (1991), here gives us a deliciously creepy collection of interrelated stories. White Pines Junction is a quaint, sparsely populated tourist town that, along with its many outdoors-oriented charms, harbors some very dark secrets. Aside from a little-publicized history of hometown thugs and serial killers, the town trades deaths with its garbage dump on a one-for-one citizen-rat basis and hosts a motel whose residents’ nighttime reveries become frighteningly true. Perhaps most disturbing of all, the town is tormented by an epidemic of mysteriously disappearing children. In one story, a preacher’s pregnant wife becomes increasingly psychotic until an unearthly force literally steals the child from her womb. In another, a harried wife finds the grisly means to dispose of her troublesome husband behind the soon-to-be-remodeled walls of her kitchen. Engstrom’s chilling scenarios will haunt readers’ dreams for days. --Carl Hays
