Customer Reviews

The TRAP

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

 

 

The Trap is a greatly disturbing novel about the horrors afflicted on a family during a one-year span. It's not enough that this family lives through everyday coldness and separation. A very disturbing act of violence is about to fall upon them and shatter their lives forever.

I bought The Trap because Tabitha King is Stephen King's wife. I knew her style and genre opposed her husband's, but never did I thought that she would be such a beautifully skilled author. King takes her time to write her prose; her beautiful and usually long sentences create a narrative yearning that one can't help but admire. The story is slow moving, but that's the brilliance behind the book. Once that horrible act happens more than halfway through the book, it takes you by total surprise.

Her characters are strong and very distinct; unlike most ficiton, her characters feel real and believable. So once the shocking event occurs more than halfway through the book, you can't help but feel sorry for the characters that are involved. You just want to leap into the page and give them a hand.

King takes her time writing her prose, something that the typical thrill-a-minute seeker will not be able to appreciate. But The Trap is a very important work that affects its readers on many, many levels. It's a hard and complicated story to read, but it's compelling in that it is able to evoke emotions in the reader that most authors can only dream of touching. I can't wait to read more from this terrific author.

This is the book that hooked me on Tabitha King. I found that I much preferred her writing to that of her husband and set out to find all that she had published. Though this is not my favorite book by Ms. King, it is nonetheless a worthy read. It will make you look around corners and think twice while hiking alone. For a complete change of direction, make your next read "Pearl" by this promising author.

I loved this book. I thought the characters were fascinating and richly textured, as they always tend to be in Tabitha King's writings. Liv's friendship with Miss Alden was wonderful. And it's always great to get another point of view on Nodd's Ridge.

Ms. King should take writing lessions from her husband. She is over flowery and gushing about every character, room and view. Nothing at all happens until page 179 and by then I was hoping she would be silenced! She could not develop any care about her characters or heroine.

An okay read that took awhile to get interesting. After Liv left her husband with her son to their summer home is only when the story got interesting (and after about 100 pages). Some interesting thriller but predictable outcomes.

Something about a toothache, marriage difficulties, a Vietnam screenplay, a lesbian neighbor...and apparently, if you read far enough, a woman being trapped in a cabin by three sadistic thugs. Hmmm...I should marry somebody famous so I can publish any zeitgeisty, unstructured, leaden-prosed, mundane typing exercise too. BORRRRRING!!! (and I am not easily bored).

I generally like Tabitha King's work, more so than her husband's, in fact, but I'm afraid this book is simply dreadful. It's hard to say which of the characters in the Russell family is the most repugnant -- the overbearing, self-absorbed, absentee father, the cynical four-year-old son who talks and acts like no four year old I've ever met (and I have one), or the foul-mouthed mom, Liv, who plays games of shooting "Commie dogs" with her son and otherwise encourages him in violent role-playing. The stereotyped teenage daughter seems the best of the lot just because there's nothing really offensive about her. According to the jacket copy, we're supposed to admire Liv's courage and ingenuity in outsmarting the thugs who torment and abuse her, but horrified by her atrocious parenting and lack of positive relationships in her life, I found Liv's moral character to be as rotten as her teeth and could not care what happened to her. Try King's other works, especially One on One, but give this one a miss unless you enjoy graphic violence. King also shares her husband's carelessness in researching the medications involved in her story: she misspells Darvocet and further calls it a "heavy-duty painkiller" when it is in fact only a Schedule III, thus a minor analgesic. I also question whether anyone could survive after ingesting the quantity of cocaine, alcohol, Percodan, and other analgesics that Liv takes during her night of abuse and the following day. Finally, I'm not sure what the point is of the interpolated descriptions of husband Pat's Viet Nam movie other than to provide even more violence and to shock me that Liv allows her four year old to watch it.

The only reason I got this book is because she is Stephen King's wife. If she didn't have his name or backing, then I don't think she would ever be published (based only on this one book of hers, as I have not ready anything else she has written)

A woman who is in a cold, loveless marriage takes off to a summer cabin with her young son, and then every womans worst nightmare happens..She and her son are trapped in hell with rapists and murderers. The rape scenes are vulgure, disburing, and not at all needed.

Boreing beginning, Predictable ending and violent to the core. One star.

I've been a huge fan of horror novels most of my life and in the course of reading book jackets noticed that my favorite author's wife was also a writer. This is the first and only book of Tabitha King's that I have read or will ever read. I was greatly disappointed and at times disgusted. I felt like I had been thoroughly robbed of my time after reading this book.