Customer Reviews

Revelation

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Bentley Little's novels are widely available in paperback, and my curiosity got the better of me. I decided to pick up "The Revelation" after discovering that it won the Bram Stoker Award. I wasn't disappointed, but I wasn't completely sold on this novel either.

Randall, Arizona has become a target of vandals. One of the local churches has been desecrated, and there have been several cases of livestock mutilation. Sheriff Jim Weldon begins looking into the crimes, wondering whether they are crimes or fraud since the Reverend of the defiled church has disappeared. A young boy finds himself involved in Weldon's investigation, and seems to have information he could not possibly have regarding the Reverend.

Meanwhile, local man Gordon Lewis and his wife Marina are expecting a child. Complicating this is the disturbing fact that several women in the town have suffered miscarriages, and Marina suspects there's something in the water. Or worse.

A lone Preacher comes to town. Brother Elias is his name, and his mission is clear: The End is nigh, and the sinners shall suffer...

The story picks up from there, with no shortage of shocks and thrills. Little is adept at bringing together a wide variety of workable characters into a bizarre situation. There isn't too much here that would be unfamiliar to a veteran horror reader, but that's part of the novel's charm. As others have pointed out, this story follows along with a "B movie" quality about it. I couldn't agree more. I felt like I was reading a tale along the lines of the movie "Tremors", complete with desert settings and over the top action sequences. The gore is plentiful, yet never outrageous. The pacing is quick, and the shock factor kept me turning the pages. Little speaks with a quick wit and describes the goings-on with gusto. I liken his writing style to early Robert McCammon.

The book is not without its flaws. There are times where Little stumbles, and dishes out bits of unnecessary violence. The kitten incident is a prime example; check the other reviews for a synopsis. The ending is a lot of fun, but the horror seemed suspended in favor of a near-cartoonish bloodbath.

I found out later that this was awarded the Stoker for best FIRST novel, which explained everything. For a first novel, Bentley Little scores big time. I'm going to pick up a few more from him, as he can only get sharper with his writing. I'm going to give "The Revelation" 3 1/2 stars rounding up to 4 for sharp, entertaining horror, shocking shocks, and being a quality debut that has me craving more.

Little's first book is more linear and less experimental than his later works. It's more of a straight-ahead Lovecraft pastiche than the cutting-edge social commentary of his more recent work, but the scares are here, as are the King-like syampathetic characters. And there's no skimping on the gore. One of the few first novels to win the Bram Stoker award that actually deserved it.

Maybe it's me but Bentley Little's endings seem too short. A bad ending, for me, ruins the entire book. Luckily, the ending to the Revelation wasn't that bad. Just too short, about 20 pages.

This is the second Bentley Little book I've read. The first one being the House. I enjoyed reading the House very much, but the ending was garbage. It wasn't exciting and it was too short. You got the feeling, while reading the book, that the ending would be huge and dramatic. Not so.

The same thing almost happened with Revelation. The first 300 pages were great. Scacy, suspenseful, gory... fantastic. But the final battle was finished before I could even start enjoying it. There's still enough there to be considered 'satisfactory'. I just expected more.

Maybe I'm used to Stephen King and Tom Clancy. Now those two guys know how to write a conclusion. Other then that, Little's a huge talent in the horror genre.

Back in 1989, Bentley Little was a struggling writer just emerging from graduate school. Thankfully, Little managed to publish his master's thesis, a little story called "The Revelation." Thirteen years and twelve books later Bentley Little is one of the most recognized names in the horror genre. To think that the master who wrote brilliant social satire like "The Store" started out with a story about killer fetuses! Little would eventually do for Arizona what Stephen King did for Maine; turn a whole state into a festering pool of oozing evil itching to rip out humanity's throat.

"The Revelation" is set in Randall, Arizona. Randall is a podunk town where nothing much happens beyond dealing with scorching heat in the summer followed by monsoon-type rains. It is a nice, quiet place to live. It is even a good place to start a family, as Gordon and Marina Lewis discover when Marina becomes pregnant. For Sheriff Jim Weldon, Randall is usually a quiet town with minimal problems. Yep, Randall is an overall nice place to live, work, go to church, or even hang out at the local redneck bar. Unfortunately, Randall is a construct in the mind of Bentley Little, so we know something is bound to turn up that might make life a tad unpleasant in this picturesque town.

The dilemma starts when the local Episcopalian minister and his family disappear. The only clue left behind is on the minister's church, where unprintable obscenities are scrawled all over the building with goat blood. Quickly following on the heels of this shocking scene is the discovery of dead, mutilated goats on all the farms in the region. Then people start dying or disappearing, attacked by unknown assailants possessing a horrible bloodlust. Weldon, Gordon, and Father Andrews (the replacement minister at the Episcopalian church) start to experience weird, sweat spraying nightmares about a cemetery for dead babies and some sort of evil being with a penchant for leaping out of fires. Throw in an enigmatic, bible-thumping weirdo named Brother Elias, and you have the essence of this gross, supernatural horror novel.

Little's first novel contains many of the great hallmarks one sees in his later books: the placidity of normal everyday life rudely jolted by a horrific, supernatural event, an ancient evil reawakening after years of dormancy, a high body count with gallons of spilled blood, and very imaginative scenes that leave the reader in head shaking wonder while bringing on copious amounts of grade-A queasiness.

At the same time, "The Revelation" also contains some of the flaws one sees in Little's later works: threads that go nowhere (blood appears on a church in Phoenix, but nothing ever comes of it), unexplained phenomena and events, and an ending that always seems like a letdown after a great buildup (although the ending here is more detailed than some of the other conclusions in his later books).

Ultimately, "The Revelation" is still great fun for those who cackle over horror books and movies. This book, along with "The Store" would make a great movie. Bentley Little shows no sign of letting up anytime in the near future, faithfully churning out a new novel every year or so. If only he gave the same attention to his conclusions as he does for his buildups, his books would attain near perfection.

I read this asinine book while in bed with a case of influenza. It may well have delayed my recovery. The plot: Some kind of ageless evil is menacing a rural town, manifesting itself in the form of rampaging reanimated fetuses (no joke, people). After all kinds of grisly, mysterious happenings (taking up more than half of the novel) a stereotypical wild-eyed preacher, leading a small band of determined locals, shows up with a plan to save the day. Now, it should be noted that horror novels, if they are to be bothered with at all, ought to have at minimum as much merit as your average slasher movie--but it seems to me that I wasted both less money and less time watching "Scream," which at least scored a few points for decent satire. "The Revelation," conversely, is so witless, blandly written, and unimaginative (just for fun, count how many chapters end with sentences like "The last thing he heard before he blacked out...") that I can only assume that it must have been a lousy year in horror fiction for this to have won--as the front cover boasts--the Bram Stoker Award. It's also gratuitously violent; one tasteless scene involving a kitten nearly inspired me to toss the book right out the nearest window. The characters are thoroughly uninteresting; they're either cardboard cutouts (the aforementioned preacher) or so vaguely sketched that it's difficult to get a handle on them. There's no revelation here worth talking about--though it convinced me that trash fiction is no better than trash cinema.

A huge Bentley Little fan, I was thrilled to finally come across a copy of his first novel, THE REVELATION. Unfortunately, I was disappointed with this formulaic book, which relied more on gratuitous gore, rather than carefully orchestrated suspense, to generate chills. The characters didn't come across as totally believable and the setting seemed cardboard. What's more, the ending turned out to be a yawner and a real let down. Despite the book's raggedness, you'll find hints of motifs that Little would so masterfully use in later novels, such as bizarre non sequiturs and nightmarish imagery. It's obvious Little was still searching for his voice in THE REVELATION. What's amazing to me, however, is how this inauspicious novel ever won a Bram Stoker. That doesn't say much about the competition that year, nor the panel that cast their votes. In my opinion, THE IGNORED (and, arguably, THE STORE) are much more deserving of the Stoker, than THE REVELATION. Fortunately, Little would mature as a writer and eventually would become one of the most original writers in the horror genre.

God has banished Satan from his presence forever. In his anger at this humiliation, Satan has vowed to destroy God's handiwork: mankind. Over the eons, many battles have been fought, but the forces of God have won every time. Randal, Arizona is a quiet town that soon will be the locale of the latest skirmish in the eternal war between good and evil.

The preliminary thrusts begin when an Episcopalian minister and his family vanish while a child dreams of what happened to them. The lad leads the sheriff to the spot where their bodies are found. When the child has another dream, he immediately calls the sheriff. However, before he can relate his latest vision, his house explodes, killing all the occupants. An evangelical preacher arrives in town to explain what must be done to stop evil from winning for the first time. Using his experience gained over too many fights during the millennium, he rallies his chosen to risk their lives in defeating Satan's soldiers.

THE REVELATION pulsates with a palatable force that leaves readers feeling they journeyed into a world of terror rarely felt in a novel. Reminiscent of THE STAND, fans of King, Koontz and Straub will fully appreciate this work. Though not yet recognized by the genre as attaining the summit of the K2 (King and Koontz), Bentley Little not only holds his own, but perhaps tops the elite.

This is the second of Little's books that I have read this and "The House" I thought this was ten times better. I just got done reading it I could not put it down. It was scary and brilliant. Awsome book!!!!!!!!!

This is the second novel I've read by Mr. Little. I read The Store four years ago and was disappointed by bland characters doing lots of stuff. The Revelation is certainly imaginative, but Gordon and crew are also featureless and rather boring. A story is pinned to characters, right? No matter how many giant fetuses rise from the soil, I didn't care about Gordon and Brother Elias. They have no grooves on which to pin a story. I did read a short story by Little entitled "The Sanctuary" a few months ago which was fantastic. Hit and miss, I suppose.

The Revelation begins with a strange prologue about the a tribe of Native Americans that are visited upon by a strange man that brings visions of the tragedy that will visit them. This ominous beginning really doesn't seem to fit but it does later after the book starts to pick up.

Fast forward to modern times and the small town of Randall, Arizona. Everything seems to be fine with the town but boiling underneath is tension mounting. The first strike is the churches which start appearing with obscene messages scrawled in goat's blood and the local Episcopal priest is gone and so is his family. Then the goat farmers die horrific deaths, too. There is also an epidemic of stillborns, including an eighty-year-old woman giving birth.

Caught up in all this is a young writer whose wife is now pregnant and the center of eeverything, the town's sheriff who is a descendant of many who have fought the evil before, and the new priest in town who has many secrets of his own. Guiding them is Brother Elias who has fought the evil before.

With murder sequences that will make you squirm and an enemy that will make you look at infants in a whole new light, The Revelation is pure horror in the vein of Stephen King or Robert McCammon and is worth the read.