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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Brief novel that left me feeling ambivalent,
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This review is from: The Well (Paperback)
Occasionally I'll revise my opinion about something I've read (it took a little time for me to decide whether or not I had enjoyed Peter Straub's "lost boy lost girl", for example). But the way I feel about a book upon reflection is, for the most part, consistent with my initial reaction. "The Well" (1981) by Jack Cady is an anomaly. Superficially, it appears that Cady was attempting to mine the same territory staked out by Straub, Stephen King and a few others at the time--but the deeper one gets into this novel that somehow seems much longer than its 193 pages, it becomes obvious that a straight horror tale isn't at all what the author was going for. That's fine, of course, but what isn't fine is that "The Well" makes use of so many of the traditional horror novel's trappings. There's a big, scary house full of deadly traps and winding passageways and ghostly apparitions, but Cady doesn't write about these things with a tenth of the conviction of Straub (during his straight horror phase) or King. He employs them to move the story along and make his point...yet, curiously, they don't seem to really interest him. The end result is a book that's bound to displease both hardcore horror fans and readers who would have been receptive to Cady's commentary on the nature of evil (which is what "The Well" is actually about) had it been cloaked in a different guise.
So why the three-star rating? (Two-and-a-half would be more like it, really.) Because, despite this muddled effort, it's obvious that Jack Cady was a good writer. There are too few central characters (one abruptly disappears from the story without ever being fully developed, only to be dredged up again a page shy of the ending), a single major setting that becomes monotonous after about forty pages, and so many sentences either beginning or ending with the words "in the house of the Trackers" that your head will spin. Frankly, it's not even entirely clear *why* the Tracker family became so eccentric/unpleasant/evil. But despite these drawbacks, Cady's eloquence shines through in certain beautifully-wrought passages. I wish I had the book in front of me so that I could provide one or two examples, but it contains quite a number of pungent observations about the underbelly of human existence that wouldn't seem out of place if you inserted them into the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer. If "The Well" doesn't convince you of Cady's talent, track down his novella 'By Reason of Darkness' (which appeared in the Douglas E. Winter-edited anthology "Prime Evil")--it's as atmospheric and unsettling a horror tale as has ever been written.
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