Customer Reviews

Twist of Fate: The Locket (Blackstone Chronicles)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A new curse has come upon Blackstone. Jules Hartwick finds a locket in his wifes car. He becomes very jealous and nervous thinking everyone is after him. Could the locket have something to do with the way he is acting or did he just have a nervous breakdown. Is Jules so insane he might kill? To find out you should read this book. It is one part of a great mystery unfolding in Blackstone. Who will be the next vivtim to this insanity that has befallen Blackstone.

Better than the first story in the Blackstone Chronicles. More frightening too because it didn't turn out as I expected. They did rush Jules into madness a little too fast. It would've been better if after he got "the locket" that he slowly became paranoid. Not in just one big dose. Still better than the first. --NA

I am not acustomed too reading horror books, so I may not do Saul justice with my critisism. I should also admit that this is the second book of his that I have read, so I can't dislike them that much. Still, Saul's prose is heavy and his use of adjectives excessive. The plot has some definite and obvious holes, which pull the reader out of the moment the author is trying to create. Apart from this, the book entertains. The story moves quickly and seems to cover all the requirements of the genre. It is not extrodinary, but I think that it would be just about right for a shortish plane ride

In the small town of Blackstone some great wrongs have been done behind the walls of the Blackstone Asylum. We've had cursed object stories dating back centuries, and now, John Saul has written a novel that is being serialized in six monthly parts on how somebody is using cursed objects to extract vengeance on the descendents and surviving employees of the Asylum.

In "Twist Of Fate: The Locket", the second installment of "The Blackstone Chronicles" the object is a locket that had to be extracted via vivisection from a delusional paranoid woman's intestinal tract after she had swallowed it. This locket will be delivered, in the dead of night to Jules Hartwick, who is the owner and president of the First National Bank Of Blackstone, after one of his dinner parties, and he will immediately be changed by it. He becomes withdrawn and cartoonishly paranoid, his once loving marriage immediately begins to dissolve, and it becomes hellish for him. He begins to believe that his wife Madeline is having an affair with Andrew Sterling, who is his loans officer and his daughter Celeste's fiancé. He can't work, as he starts believing his secretary is trying to poison him, his employees are conspiring against him, and everybody is watching him. It's not helping that he is also having some real banking problems as he is being audited because of some impractical banking practices.

We begin to see a pattern here, as we find out that Jules mother had once been an asylum gray lady.

Meanwhile, Oliver Metcalf, the novel's central character, and who is also the publisher and editor of "The Blackstone Chronicle", Blackstone's weekly newspaper, is becoming closer to Rebecca Morrison, the town's assistant librarian. Unfortunately Rebecca, who has had an accident in the past, is in the charge of her Aunt Martha Wells, a totally cartoonishly twisted Christian who sees sin and corruption is everything. She does not approve of her niece getting friendly with anybody, much less Oliver, whose sister had a very mysterious death.

As in the first episode, mayhem will ensue the possession of the cursed object, and here Jules become totally unhinged. With this episode Saul is starting to develop his main characters more, and we are left wondering who will be next.

This episode gets three and half stars, and I'm rounding upwards, because of its quick pace and the intrigue of whom the mysterious character is, and why is he sending out these cursed objects. The trouble is that the episodes have yet to stand out in any sense so far as to be memorable unto THEMSELVES, and not just because they are part of a larger whole, and the characters have yet to be anything more than standard issue. Still, the mystery is becoming more and more intriguing. I will keep reading.

For this site I have all six of these volumes in this series:


The Blackstone Chronicles #1: Eye for an Eye: The Doll (Blackstone Chronicles).
The Blackstone Chronicles #2: Twist of Fate: The Locket (Blackstone Chronicles).
The Blackstone Chronicles #3: Ashes to Ashes: The Dragon's Flame (Blackstone Chronicles, Part 3).
The Blackstone Chronicles #4: In the Shadow of Evil: The Handkerchief (Blackstone Chronicles).
The Blackstone Chronicles #5: Day of Reckoning: The Stereoscope (Blackstone Chronicles, Part 5).
The Blackstone Chronicles #6: Asylum (Blackstone Chronicles) (No 6).

In this second volume of the Blackstone Chronicles, author John Saul continues his account of the chaos that results when the abandoned Asylum in the small New Hampshire town of Blackstone is sold for development into a shopping mall. A lone, mysterious figure re-enters the Asylum one night and finds the personal artifacts which long ago belonged to the inmates. Distributing these objects to people who have some connection to the long-ago inmates, the mysterious figure ensures that their lives change--and not for the better.

(No spoilers.) After celebrating the engagement of his daughter Celeste to Andrew Sterling, Jules Hartwick, head of the Blackstone Bank, finds a package wrapped in pink paper on the seat of his car, with no card indicating the sender. Opening the package, he finds an antique locket, which he immediately believes has been sent to his devoted wife Madeline. When an image comes to him of Madeline in the arms of another man, he immediately suspects she has lover and goes to great lengths to try to prove it.

As in the preceding novel, An Eye for an Eye: The Doll, the author juxtaposes scenes of horror at the Asylum with present day scenes from the lives of Blackstone's inhabitants, the same characters appearing and reappearing throughout the series. In this novel, the opening scene involving Lorena, a paranoid woman at the Asylum who comes to possess the locket, is far more horrifying (and gory) than any previous Asylum scenes have been.

Oliver Metcalf, the editor of the local newspaper, connects all six of the novels. Oliver, subject to blinding flashes of pain as he uncovers old photographs and records for a commemorative piece on the history of the Asylum, suffered the same pains when the wrecking ball broke through a wall of the Asylum in the previous novel. Born in the Superintendent's Cottage, he is the son of the previous Superintendent, though at this point in the series the reader has few clues about the Asylum and its administrators, other than incidents of cruelty exhibited toward the inmates by unnamed people.

As in the first volume, the story moves along quickly and inevitably, the primary question being how far Jules Hartwick will go in his accusations of infidelity. Once again, the characters are not developed fully enough to make this a "character-driven" horror novel, the Gothic shock evolving more from the amount of cruelty than from our knowledge of the individuals and our surprise at their behavior. n Mary Whipple

"Twist of Fate: The Locket," the second part in The Blackstone Chronicles, begins and ends with gory eviscerating scenes, the prologue being more shocking, in my opinion, of a mental patient at the Asylum being gutted to remove a silver locket, which later comes into play. The middle part of the story is bloodless, as it closely follows Jules Hartwick, president of the First National Bank of Blackstone, as he stresses over an audit, then becomes severely paranoid after finding the above-mentioned heart-shaped locket that he believes is a sign of his wife's infidelity. This is a good serial addition to the six-part Blackstone Chronicles, preceded by "An Eye for an Eye: The Doll" (#1) and succeeded by "Ashes to Ashes: The Dragon's Flame" (#3), "In the Shadow of Evil: The Handkerchief" (#4), "Day of Reckoning: The Stereoscope" (#5), and "Asylum" (#6). As a whole, "The Blackstone Chronicles" is one of my favorite John Saul books.

Dear Mr. Saul, the story itself is quite suitable for a horror-novel but why did you have to repeat exactly the same story as in part one? You just changed the gift, the family and the way the person(s) get killed. This is not enough. I hope this series improves soon..

What in the world is with these heirlooms that keep showing up?This was a little better than the first volume, but only a little.

Judging from the Chronicle that preceded "The Locket," I was prepared for another "unscary" tale. I was pleasantly suprised. Unlike the first tale, this one built the intriguing plot beautifully, and I was very often in suspense. The idea of jealously driving a person to murder is terrifyingly worth reading about. However, this story is almost identical in nature to the first one, and I found some of the characters being a little too ignorant of their surroundings, and that made the story a bit unrealistic. But all in all, "The Locket" is a very refreshing tale.

I read this in a couple of days, and I must say that the schmuck who wrote the review below ("Not Again!" was the title) was full of it. This book is only similar to the first because it has another gift being sent out to someone. Otherwise, it is *totally* different than the first, and is even pretty *scary* at times. I eagerly await #3, which I take will be even better. I can tell newcomers to this serial book this much: DO NOT LISTEN TO THE BAD REVIEWS OF BOOKS!