Underground [Hardcover]

Craig Spector (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 10, 2005

Once upon a time there were seven good friends. They were the forgotten little brothers and sisters of the Big Chill generation, born in the turbulent year when the flames of Watts lit the City of Angels and napalm kissed the war-torn skies of Vietnam. They called themselves The Underground. For Justin and Mia, Josh and Caroline, Amy, Seth, and Simon, there was nothing but drugs and music, combined with boundless cynicism and a deep yearning for something that really mattered.

As graduation rolled around, they knew they would drift apart. By Labor Day weekend, there was just enough time to throw one last private party. But where? Creepy old Custis Manor was temporarily uninhabited. So they motored out to the moldering southern plantation, ready to party the night away.

They could not have known that on the other side of the mirrors, something watched: a corrupt, voracious force, neither fully living nor truly dead. It was a soulless spirit of evil that had spent more than two hundred years cultivating its terrible powers.

It was the Great Night. And Custis Manor was its domain.

In one terrifying night their lives were forever shattered. One died. One disappeared. The survivors were scarred both inside and out. For twenty years, they couldn't face the truth of what had really happened.

Until now.

One has gone back, and through the mirror. And now the remaining friends are forced to confront the demons of their own pasts and a greater nightmare beyond their comprehension. Together they must face the Great Night, lay waste to its vicious legacy, and free the thousands of souls still trapped there, as the reunited Underground meets the Underground Railroad of souls.

A truly original metaphysical thriller---gory and intense, satisfying and unique, Underground is a startling vision of the nightmare dimension from one of the true masters of the genre.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A festering supernatural scourge provides a group of aging Gen-Xers with one last opportunity to revive the idealism of their youth in Spector's horror redux of The Big Chill. In the 1980s, a band of seven high school rebels who called themselves the Underground accidentally accessed a dimension of evil during a drug-fueled party at leader Josh Custis's ancestral Virginia mansion. The event left one dead, one trapped in the dark realm and the rest forever conscious of the hazards of wayward youth. Twenty years later, Josh persuades the survivors to help save their buddy Justin, who's just forced his way across the dimensional divide, though this will involve neutralizing the Great Night, the evil overmind of the other dimension, and freeing the souls of slaves and other sacrificial victims who have been fed to it by generations of Custis men in exchange for political power. While the two main plots—the otherworldly rescue mission initiated by the Underground, and the Custis family's legacy of supernatural evil—never quite mesh, Spector (To Bury the Dead) writes (and occasionally overwrites) with the brio and energy of his splatterpunk heyday to yank readers in and keep their attention. Agent, Scott Agostoni at William Morris. (Apr. 16)
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Review

"In To Bury the Dead, Craig Spector has achieved a mature, hard-won narrative authority that will be deeply gratifying to all, as well as to the many thousands of readers who have enjoyed his earlier work. The novel moves its protagonist from believable heroism into an equally convincing moral darkness terrible to behold, and it carries us with it every step along the way. This is what horror wants to be when it grows up, a vision of tragic inevitability rooted in character, ruthless and inexorably unfolding, yet shot through with the possibility of grace."--Peter Straub

"Craig Spector's solo debut is a riveting marvel: funny, powerful, and wise. Amid aching emotion are insights almost unbearably poignant, truths transcendent. The writing is exquisitely uneasy and holds the reader spellbound in a harrowing opera of loss and hope. This is a complex world where courage is religion and all things burn except faith. Spector has written a stunning novel."--Richard Christian Matheson on To Bury the Dead

"Spector (The Light at the End) is a strong writer who convincingly re-creates the dark, often gruesome world of paramedics and firefighters. Most impressive is his exploration into Paul's character and how ordinary people cope with extraordinary grief and horror. Not for the faint of heart, Spector's latest is for lovers of the best psychological thrillers, along the lines of Ruth Rendell's."--Publishers Weekly

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (March 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765306603
• ISBN-13: 978-0765306609
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,882,762 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars fast and furious novel of thrills, chills and ideals, October 18, 2005

By 

Will Daniels "Horror Reader" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Underground (Hardcover)

Being, in Publisher's Weekly parlance "an aging Gen-Xer", myself, I am greatly impressed on how Spector is able to get the details of my reality so dead on that I trust him implicitly as he moves into compelling historical detail and creates from whole cloth a unique metaphysical evil.

Having been a casual fan of THE BRIDGE and LIGHT AT THE END, I've found his writing to be more intense, thanks to a tighter focus. While many novels I've read lately tend to be bloated and meandering, with little pay-off in terms of ideas, this book packs a wallop thanks to tense, sinewy prose and smart handling of racial politics.

The book also benefits from an experimental way of handling exposition, "setting the scene" before launching into the drama. He also has a much better sense of drive and pacing than either is earlier work or much of his "competition." I can only imagine these improvements are a product of his screenwriting.

Finally, since books should be "about something," it's interesting for a white horror writer to attack the issue of racism and the legacy of slavery in America in such a bold and sophisticated way, while keeping the bulk of the protagonists the white, disaffected males typical of the genre. The "aging Gen-Xers" once made lots of noise about racism and sexism and the like. The '60's radicals have certainly gone the way of the buffalo. Dennis Hopper is a conservative now. As the 35-45 year old set try to reconcile mortgage payments with ideals, it's nice to see a mature yet pulpy book that addresses this tension so eloquently. On a broader note, it's nice to see a writer who's prose or politics have not mellowed, but, instead, have become seemingly more ferocious and passionately felt.

Sign me up for the next one.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars gripping haunted house thriller, March 30, 2005

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Underground (Hardcover)

In Stillson Beach, Virginia, Justin Van Slyke is on a tour of historical antebellum Custis Manor, a place where black slaves were slaughtered. A vandalism incident enables Justin to wander off on his own. He reaches his destination and dives through a large mirror though his right hand fails to make it through the portal. It is sliced off and left behind.

Josh Custis, whose family owns the mansion, sends word to the other three surviving members of the Underground to meet with him in the Church of the Open Door. Caroline Tabb Connolly accompanied by her spouse and daughter, addict Amy Kaplan, and Seth Bryant who left his pregnant wife at home heed Josh's call. Josh explains that Justin went through the portal bringing home the nightmare of what happened in 1983 when seven suburban teens formed the Underground. One of them Simon Baxter tripping on acid tried to slice another Mia Cheever, but Justin stopped him. Mia fell through a mirror portal while Simon bled to death from cuts caused by chards of broken glass. Justin has forced them to act even while the medical examiner cannot understand how a severed hand can have a pulse.

This haunted house thriller grips the audience from the moment that Justin splits from the tour to enter the mirror and never slows down until the final altercation with the evil on the other side of the portal. The story line is fast-paced, filled with action, and constantly leave readers with goose bumps. Though the magnificent seven are labeled rather than fully developed with a couple of exceptions, ghost story fans will gladly journey through the portal with the UNDERGROUND.

Harriet Klausner

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantasy at its best, April 8, 2007

By 

L. Berkowitz "Fiction convert" (Berkeley CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Underground (Hardcover)

Underground is the second book I've read by Craig Spector, the first having been To Bury the Dead. Underground is quite different from my first read by Spector because it takes place in the realm of fantasy. I think this helps the reader to take a really good look at just how deeply the roots of racism remain in the United States, and how it completely destroys the lives of everyone touched by even the knowledge, let alone the participation in what goes along with it: torture, rape and killing. He describes well the development of personal empires through the use of slavery as well as the lengths to which its overlords will go in order to protect its continuance. Just as with To Bury the Dead, I was on the edge of my seat as I read quickly in order to get to the point of resolution at the end - or was it? I appreciate it when the author leaves a lot of interpretation up to the reader. I finished Underground a few weeks ago, but the characters stayed with me in the back of my mind as I contemplated their various fates. The bonus we are treated to in Underground is Craig Spector's reach back into history, including even a snapshot of the Black Panther Party. At the point that he used their true history of events to portray one of the characters, Louis, he caught both my attention and appreciation. When an author goes to the trouble of thoroughly researching actual events in order to build believable characters, especially within the context of a fantasy thriller, there is a huge hook and lots of added dimension. I recommend this very interesting read.