Amazon.com Review
An adolescent girl sneaks out of her house at night, walks down a winding path between trees to a wide, swollen river where she goes wading in the dark with two boys. That girl grows up into a woman named Madlen. At the start of the novel she has just lost her husband in a car accident and is taking her daughter and son from California back to the setting of her adolescence in Rampage, Iowa.
The teenaged daughter Claire, who is now the age Madlen was when she used to slip out and go down to the river, has "lost track of herself." Fatherless, suddenly yanked from her familiar suburban California environment to this strange, slow town in Iowa, Claire finds herself adrift, vaguely searching for something. A series of portents gather danger about her: an old woman dies in the mud while walking confused in a rainstorm; a murderer kidnaps (or rescues?) a small child and comes back home to Rampage to hide; Madlen's father's young wife is pregnant but has a leaky womb; and Madlen is going slightly mad as she revisits in her mind the tragic events surrounding her mother's death. Claire unconsciously begins to repeat Madlen's old patterns, including wading at night in the river.
This elegant, chilling novel moves slowly--developing several characters with a sure, steady hand--and yet the mysterious allure of an unseen element that one character calls "some place dark and unspeakable" keeps you turning the pages, wondering how the gathering tension will eventually resolve. The climax is a sudden, sharp shock, bringing all the threads together in a single violent sequence.
Susan Taylor Chehak has crafted a powerful tale of non-supernatural horror that will reward those who are patient enough to fall under its spell. Long after you've finished reading it, Rampage will linger in your mind. --Fiona Webster
From Publishers Weekly
Named, like Chehak's 1990 Harmony, for the small Midwestern town of its setting, this coolly precise, rather muted gothic thriller opens in Oregon, when Rafe Ramsey steals four-year-old Jolie, whom he claims is his daughter, away from her abusive foster parents, whom he kills before fleeing for California. Meanwhile, the husband of Rafe's childhood playmate Madlen Cramer dies in L.A. in a mysterious car wreck. Unbeknownst to her, Rafe follows grieving Madlen and her two children back to her father's house in Rampage, Iowa, where she, Rafe and her dead husband, Haven, grew up. A claustrophobic town, sandwiched between an insane asylum and a prison, tossed by deadly, not-quite-natural thunderstorms, Rampage holds secrets that are stirred up by Madlen's and Rafe's separate arrivals. Chehak is at her best describing memories, by turns idyllic and disturbing, of the lost childhood that Madlen, Rafe and Haven shared, and of their nascent understanding of the dark, grownup doings around them. Although Rafe is an intriguing villain whose violence seems to spring from thwarted attempts at love, the book's contrived climax?when Madlen must decide whether to take him as a lover or else force herself to look into his sinister past?is less satisfying than the slow buildup and expert atmospherics for which Chehak (Smithereens) is already well known. (Aug.) FYI: Chehak and her husband recently opened a bookstore/cafe called Inxspots in Keystone, Colo.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.