Customer Reviews

The Vanishment

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

 

 

Denis McEoin a.k.a. Jonathan Aycliffe a.k.a. Daniel Easterman relies on a common theme in many of his ghostly novels, i.e. child abuse taken to the grave and beyond. One major question that keeps the reader on edge in "The Vanishment" (1993) is whether an innocent four-year-old will meet a fate similar to her ghostly predecessor in Petherick House.

The first-person narrator, Peter Clare is not a very likeable character. He emotionally blackmails his wife, Sarah, into staying with him in Petherick House which she fears and hates from the moment they step over the threshold. When Sarah vanishes after a minor supernatural build-up, my first reaction was relief. I thought, 'Good, she finally dumped the s.o.b.'

However the manner of her disappearance was rather strange, i.e. in the middle of the night in her nightgown, without her purse. So then I began to wonder if her husband had murdered her. It's rare for a first-person narrator to murder someone without the reader's knowledge, but this literary trick has been attempted before with varying degrees of success--Dame Agatha Christie comes to mind.

Jonathan Aycliffe includes some original supernatural shocks in "The Vanishment." The narrator is a writer and Petherick House in Cornwall by the sea acts like a jolt of amphetamine to his talent. He writes and writes, and when he finally submits his accumulated short stories, he gets a puzzling phone call from his publisher: "How come all you've sent me is twenty copies of the same piece?"

The piece in question is a fragment of a transcript of an inquest that took place long before the narrator was born. It concerns the death by drowning of a daughter of Petherick House. She had borne a child out-of-wedlock back in the days of Queen Victoria. Her child disappeared, her father (who was also supposed to be the father of her child) died, and the inquest concluded that the woman named Susannah committed suicide.

But "The Vanishment" is not that simple a haunting. There is real evil in Petherick House and it follows Peter Clare back to London and into the house of his friends.

This novel of the supernatural isn't my favorite Jonathan Aycliffe. "The Talisman" (1999) and "A Shadow on the Wall" (2000) hold that honor. There are some fine frights in "The Vanishment" (1993) but not enough to compensate for my dislike of the narrator. Also the ending left me puzzled. What did Peter Clare remove from the closet under the stairs and throw into the sea? I went back over the final chapter a couple of times, and it's irritating to report that I still don't know what it was.

It is another one of Aycliffe's horror stories. Very long on suspence and atmosphere. A small dash of horror, and a touch of the supernatural. Basically, a writer and his spouse go to a vacation home to unwind and to patch together their marriage. His wife senses something is wrong with the house, but can't put her finger on it. Her husband dismisses these feelings of hers. He is forced to believe that yes, something is going on when his wife disappears into thin air one night. He then finds out that the house has a long and sordid history that the superstitious locals are loath to talk about.

I found this book quite by accident and i must confess, the first few pages didn't impress me, but i was determined to finish this book. Oh, my...THE VANISHMENT is a deceptively simple premise--a haunted house, a horrible crime committed in a past that relives it's memories over and over. But what if the terrors of the house were not limited to the original four walls? What if the ghosts could follow and torment innocents that had no connection to the house, other than just being friends of someone who had been there. The Petherick house is one of the most terrifying creations I've found in a long time. The last fifteen pages will snatch your breath away and the ending is a horror classic--simple and terrifying. Read THE VANISHMENT!! I dare you!!

I should say that I love a good haunting story, and The Vanishment delivers. I read all types of horror, but it is stories like this one that stay with me.

Other reviewers have made valid points that may or may not interfere with your enjoyment of this novel. To some extent, I feel the author does take some liberties and toys with his reader a bit, both with his characters and with the ending.

If you are a reader that doesn't mind questioning the intentions and qualities of your antagonist, you should have no trouble here. If you prefer all loose ends tied up in a way that could be written in stone, you may have some difficulty here.

All in all, The Vanishment offers up a good story with some genuine chills without mistaking them with the discomfort of gore and over the top violence and remains a favorite chiller in my collection.

Great book for those who like to scare themselves silly before going to bed at night.
I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's one you find hard to put down.

This was a tough one to rate. On one hand, the plot is quite good. However, the author took a real risk with his characters, and that risk simply did not pay off (for me, at least).

The highlight of the book is its plot. The backstory of Petherick House is sufficiently disturbing, and the story is crafted in such a way that a sense of dread pervades the book, starting right from the very beginning. The description on the back of the book gives the reader fair warning that some significant, creepy events (including the wife's disappearance) will take place, and each event is bolstered by the fact that the atmosphere is always a bit unnerving, and there is always a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Aycliffe is quite good at ensuring that the reader often feels at least a little off-balance, and when the aforementioned events occur, they are certainly suspenseful. I can't say that anything that happens falls into the truly terrifying category, but there are a few points that are genuinely creepy and verge on being scary, particularly near the end.

The pacing is a little problematic, as there are times in which things happen very quickly, and there are also times in which the story drags a bit. That's not an insurmountable issue, though, because I think that Aycliffe does a good enough job of making things just intriguing enough that even when the action slows, the reader still cares enough to continue reading in order to find out how things progress.

The real issue I had with 'The Vanishment' is the characters, particularly the protangist (Peter), but pretty much every character is not exactly sympathetic. As the character that we follow throughout the course of the book, we are shown Peter's thoughts as everything transpires, and he's just. . . horrible. He's so cold and disconnected from actual human emotions that I actually found myself re-reading some of his thoughts with disbelief that Aycliffe thought it was a good idea to make Peter so callous, on more than one occasion. His wife's disappearance isn't a spoiler (again, it's mentioned in the book's description), but I should preface the following with the warning that some of my thoughts about his reaction and some other character-related moments will be vaguely spoiler-y, so I'll enter better safe than sorry mode and leave some space. . .







After his wife's disappearance, Peter is so self-centered and removed from actual feelings that I started to actively loathe him. He has a few token thoughts of quasi-concern, but those all-too-quickly go by the wayside, as he never seems particularly anxious or worried or scared about what has happened to his wife. Granted, it could be argued that he was in shock, but since that overall mindset and method of operation for him continues throughout the book, I think the explanation is that Peter is essentially a fairly awful person. In fact, not all that much time (I think it was something like 4-6 months) passes before he starts looking at other women and even having difficulty picturing his wife's face. Now, they had been married for over two decades, and had been through quite a horrific experience (about which I will not go into detail, but suffice it to say, it made Peter irredeemable, in my view), but in the matter of just a few months, he starts to forget what she looks like. I guess that's not all that surprising because most of their interaction prior to her disappearance is full of him disregarding her thoughts and feelings. And when the horror begins to affect the other people around him in truly catastrophic ways (partly because he never thought about the consequences of any of his actions), he seems so blase about all of it. He's just horrible; really, truly horrible, and I almost never feel that way about characters because they usually have at least one trait that, while not making them sympathetic necessarily, does at least make them even the tiniest bit more understandable. That did not happen in this case - Peter started off on a relatively sour note, and it just grew progressively worse, with every self-absorbed, cold thought he had.

The other characters, as I said, do not fare much better. Peter's wife isn't unsympathetic, but she does seem to be severely lacking in the backbone department. Their close friends are little more than proverbial cardboard cutouts, but one moment seemed to pretty much set the tone for at least one of them, too: (Note: this is a spoiler for one very brief scene, but that scene doesn't have any impact on anything else that happens): After his wife's disappearance, Peter goes to stay with their two friends Tim and Susan (and their young daughter), and one night, Susan actually offers to have sex with Peter, in order to "comfort" him. Peter considers this for a moment, and then says "better not" because Susan and Tim are happily married. The fact that he actually had to remind her that she was happily married and probably didn't want to hurt her husband (her offer included the requisite mention of how Tim didn't have to know) made me roll my eyes so hard that I almost hurt myself, as I had to wonder (for the umpteenth time) what was wrong with these people. That, in addition to the fact that Tim and Susan display a remarkably poor lack of judgment (others may not agree with this) in terms of their present situation with Peter and the aforementioned past horrific event that concerned Peter and his wife, was just a further indication that the characterization in this book, pretty much across the board, left something to be desired. And that's putting it mildly.

What it all boils down to is that I simply could not stand the characters, particularly Peter who rapidly became one of the worst characters about whom I have ever read. That said, the ghosts, possession, poltergeist activity, and the truly disturbing (even horrifying) past events that served as the purpose of, and impetus for, everything else, made the book a pretty good read. If one can get past the characters.