Customer Reviews

Suffer the Children

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

While John Saul is not held in the highest of regard by many horror fans, he is the man who first introduced me to the genre. Some of his later novels did indeed become pretty repetitive, but his first novel, Suffer the Children, is a dead-on, unflinching classic. This was the first truly scary book I ever read; I was probably around twelve at the time, and I remember staying up into the wee hours of the morning to finish it and then finding it almost impossible to get to sleep. Reading it again now, it still possesses much of the power it possessed years ago. It is a tale of a family curse, murder, schizophrenia, general unhappiness, and gruesome, frightening events. Long ago, the scion of the Conger family killed his daughter, supposedly bringing a curse down upon the succeeding generations of his family. Now, Jack Conger fears the curse is real. In a drunken rage, he physically assaults his youngest little girl Sarah. While he struggles to remember what exactly happened that day and grows increasingly estranged from his long-suffering wife, his daughter exists in a quasi-comatose state, living in her own silent fantasy world. The Congers look at their first daughter as a true blessing through all of their pain--Elizabeth is mature beyond her years and takes care of her little sister with great love and kindness. When several local children begin to disappear, though, the Congers' delicately balanced world finally turns completely upside down.

This is a pretty scary novel, largely because the horror centers around the two young sisters Elizabeth and Sarah. The description of the gloomy woods around the home and the truly dangerous embankment nearby help produce a great dark atmosphere, but Saul's description of a series of horrible events is especially unsettling. The story gets pretty gruesome at one point, and I think some horror writers would not be bold enough to go as far as Saul did. Saul committed himself fully to this novel and dared to describe everything in great detail; combine that with his incredibly effective characterization of the two sisters and you get a true horror classic in every sense of the word. Saul hooks you securely in his clutches and drags you down with him into the pits of depravity. The ending did not provide me with a complete feeling of closure, but I certainly have no quarrel with it; in fact, the evil Saul so vividly describes almost defies comprehension and thus necessitates the type of ending Saul chose to give us. I would highly recommend this novel to any horror fan--Saul creates a psychological atmosphere of real terror that essentially oozes out of the pores of each page.

Jack and Rose Conger feel they have found the ideal town to raise their two daughters, Sarah, 11 and Elizabeth, 13. At the opening of the story, Sarah has been mute for over a year and enrolled in a special program. Elizabeth appears to be an unremarkable preteen until...her parents find a portrait of a girl in their attic who bears a strong resemblance to Elizabeth!

From the time that picture is displayed, Elizabeth undergoes a change of personality. She lures a few local children into a cave where they are left to starve. She rarely entered the cave and when she did, she flogged the children and gave them a dead cat to play with.

Matters reach a head when her sister is found dragging the arm of a child who had died. Sarah is subsequently institutionalized. She remained in an institution for 15 years. When she and Elizabeth are reunited 15 years later, the mere mention of "Beth" sends Sarah back into mute fear.

Who WAS Beth? And who was the child in the portrait? What became of the children who were lured into the cave? And what of Elizabeth, their instrument of doom?

I read the review before I bought this book and I thought I would enjoy it but I didn't.

Saul tackles the controversial subject of child molestation in this one then branches off into a macabre story about a possessed/reincarnated? young girl that does horrible things to to other children.

I was very confused by this book but I gave it the benefit of the doubt right up until the very disappointing end. My final word on this is, the book has plot holes so wide you could hide mack trucks in them.

I couldn't identify with the characters either and I think that's an important element of any story.

Saul I think you ran out of steam one quarter of the way into the book and rushed it off to meet your deadline. Don't do it again!

This was the first John Saul book I've ever read and the story grabbed me quickly, indeed I read the entire story in two days. I was so expecting a great ending, but was denied. At first I thought I was missing the last chapter (maybe I was), but it just trailed off without any real closure I felt. A good read anyway.

I believe I read Suffer the Children when I was in middle school back in the 70's?? I guess I picked it up not knowing what kind of a book it was and I don't remember if I finished it but I know I will never forget the awful cave scenes. The seaweed and sand sandwiches will forever be etched in my mind and remembering all of that still disgusts me today! That book changed the way I read from then on...I've never picked up another novel that looked even somewhat similar in name or cover.

This book is dealing with the children, their way of thinking and nobody who is somebody could do it better than John Saul. Neither Freud. It`s not really a horror novel but it contains such gore that would make certain weak people nervous. That`s probably the reason that doesn`t exist a movie called "Suffer The Children". Not yet.

I can't even decide where to start with this book. I just barely finished reading it, and my mind is completely numb, and I don't dare go to bed for fear that an evil child holding a knife in one hand and a headless dead cat or a severed arm in the other will appear at the foot of my bed. I have never in my life read a book like this one, and that is very tough for me to say. When it comes to my preferred genre of books, I usually tend to gear towards splatterpunk horror, or extreme horror books. The more disturbing a book is, the better, and I have been told that I have a stomach of steel.

I had heard about this book from an online forum discussing the scariest, most disturbing novels they have ever read and decided to go pick it up at my local paperback book exchange store. I really didn't expect much after the last novel I read (Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite, best horror novel I've read to date), and almost put the book down after reading the first 50 pages. I'm glad, and regretful at the same time, that I decided to continue on reading.

As far as extreme goes, this book is extreme...in some sort of disturbingly sick and vicious way. From the get-go Saul presents you with a delicate, yet simple prose, and although he didn't describe Port Arbello as well as Stephen King or Poppy Brite would have, you still felt like you were there in that sad little dreary town. The story line is very detailed and well thought out, and it almost beckons you to keep going until the end.

Now for the content. Oh boy. What can I say? It was not what I expected. There isn't that much gore in this book as you think there is, but then again, there is a lot of guts and grue. Saul vaguely describes the gruesome scenes while still making them nightmarish and disturbing. I've always found that holding back on gruesome detail is more effective when it comes to horror. And WOW, was it effective. I'm not easily scared, and consider my "stomach of steel" comment as well. Despite those two things, I often found myself cringing and nearly vomiting while reading this book, and that's saying a lot. This book is so dark and disturbing, it is unbelievable, so unbelievable that you have to read it to really know what I'm talking about. This book made me never want to have kids, EVER. I think the scariest part was that it involved small children, and Saul was very brave to include the subject of psychotic youth as a center for the plot. I believe not many authors do that because it is often times to disturbing for the reader. But Saul grasped the concept, and threw it in your face, making you struggle not to throw the book against the wall.

Lastly, I gave this book 4 stars because of (drum roll) the awful ending. I didn't feel like it was necessarily rushed, I just felt like it was unnecessary, and left a lot of lose ends to still be tied up. But, I guess I'm just used to happy, "Pollyanna" endings, and I guess it was Saul's mission to leave it open, which is in some sense more effective. It still pissed me off though. Overall this book was brutal, dark, disturbing, and insanely interesting. WORD OF WARNING: DEFINITELY not for the faint of heart. Although the gore and grue factor isn't necessarily hyped up, the disturbing aspect is, and this book will stay with you FOREVER. I know it will stay with me. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Now to figure out how to get to sleep tonight.

This was a fantastic, well-written book. I couldn't quit thinking about it after I read it. Even though, as some reviewers have stated, it does leave things somewhat unresolved, it stills tells a terrific horror story. Then ending is just a classic Saul ending.

I read this book as a teen when it first came out and loved it. Now that I'm an adult, it's good but not as great as I remember it. I must say though, the Kindle version is full of sentences without periods and some of the worst typos I have ever seen. I am shocked that this book could have made it to "print" this way. I was happy to see that John Saul's back catalog was finally coming to Kindle, but if they all have typos like Suffer the Children does, I may not read another.

This book is so scary that I can tell you about it 25 years after I read it. How many books can you say that about? I'm the type of reader who can read five books a week and not remember most of them a year later. So good or bad this book is memorable.