Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Become enmeshed, September 14, 2004
Kate McDolen is a grade school teacher in the town of Pippins, Virginia. One fateful day she finally gets fed up with the worst kid in the school and crosses the line in dealing with him. Facing the almost certain loss of her job and probably legal action as well, she decides to run. She isn't that happy with her life, anyway. She takes with her an eight year-old girl named Mistie, whom everybody knows is being abused at home. Kate knows people, and plans to take Mistie someplace far away where she can grow up safely.
It isn't the most well thought out plan, and control is taken out of Kate's hands almost immediately anyway by a bitter, cruel teenaged girl named Tony. Tony is running also - from a botched convenience store holdup and also from her deadbeat mother and pathetic home life. She intends to go to Texas where her wealthy, connected father can give her the life she feels she deserves. Kate's road trip to salvation suddenly takes a sharp u-turn into hell.
While a lesser writer would have piled on horror after horror out of pure sadism, Massie provides a story in which there is much cruelty, but never any without reason. Intense but not to gratuitous excess, it rises above the crop of horror novels that seek only to disgust the reader. She also keeps her antagonist from becoming a cartoon villain by telling one third of the story from her perspective. Tony commits horrific acts and while you certainly never like her, you actually do feel for her. She is a product of her environment as much as anyone else, and she has intriguing psychological motivations for her behavior. This, too, sets it apart from more common works.
This is a fast-paced, compulsively readable thriller about life on the dark side of the Mason-Dixon Line.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
hard edged thriller well worth the time!, June 2, 2002
By A Customer
Wire Mesh Mothers might not be typical "horror" as suggested by several other reviewers, but then horror comes in many forms, not only ghosts or vampires. They come in the form of fears, weaknesses, anger, and missteps in life. Maybe it should have been labeled a thiller instead, but thrillers can be horror stories, too. The characters in Wire Mesh Mothers are realistic in their motives and in the circumstances those motives sweep them into as the story progresses. One reviewer seemed off-put that Kate was spoiled and rich. That seemed to me to be the point of her character from the outset, and the story brought her through some terrifying and painful moments that taught her about her own shallowness and her own, at long last, innate strength to change. I recommend this book for its fast-paced tale of power struggles and human flaws, as well as for its finely crafted prose. I've read two other Massie novels and even though my favorite remains Welcome Back to the Night, this one ranks up there.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not a horror novel by any stretch of the imagination, May 22, 2002
Wire Mesh Mothers is yet another novel (in a recent string of novels) that is entirely mislabeled under the banner of "horror". Nothing could be further from the truth where this one is concerned.There is absolutely no sympathy to be had for the main character of Kate McDolan. She's an unhappy, spoiled upper-class little brat. She is trapped in a loveless marriage of her own creation. She is despondent over her inability to relate with her own son and resented as a teacher by the small town yokels. She opts to one day "conveniently kidnap" the nightgown-wearing, one-dimensional-stereotypical-loner/weirdo, Mistie Henderson. Kate's preposterous intent is to steal herself and Mistie, relocate to Canada and live happily ever after with her hippie friends from college. A better life for both of them is her ultimate vision. The preposterous turns to the ludicrous when their departure is ruined before it even begins. Kate is carjacked by a 15 year old small town-Cops reject-gangsta-wanna-be named Tony (a.k.a. Angela.) I found it incredibly difficult to fathom that a fit, 38 year old teacher could not have overpowered a scrawny 15 year old kid ONCE throughout this entire story. Kate comes out of this ordeal with more damage to herself that is reasonably possible. Tony (Angela) herself annoyingly shifts personas throughout the novel. She's a grade school drop-out amazed at the interior of a no-tell motel one moment... a first rate actress finagling a ride out of ridiculously cardboard-cutout (read: doofus) secondary characters the next...all generously combined with a cold, methodical foul-mouthed murderess every other moment of the story. The story stops dead in the final pages, without any sort of concrete resolution. A world of entertaining novels awaits you out there... regrettably "Wire Mesh Mothers" is not one of them.
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