Thrown from a speeding car after attempting to cut into drug kingpin Aitch's empire, Mike lies near death on the Oregon desert, which, he discovers, is home to an abandoned spa with special healing waters.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Kirkus Reviews
Gritty, spare but rather empty horror yarn from the author of Dr. Adder, Farewell, Horizontal, Infernal Devices, etc. Vicious drug-dealer Aitch and his reluctant sidekick Charlie beat their erstwhile partner Mike, a doctor and drug addict, to a pulp, then throw him from a car in the high desert of eastern Oregon following an attempted double-cross. Brought, barely alive, to an abandoned spa resort by a concerned trucker, Mike suffers wild dreams of bodies splitting asunder, and of an ancient doctor waving a scalpel--who subsequently appears alive, bathing in a pool of the spa's sulfurous water. Mike too bathes and drinks, and is healed in body, indeed possessed of extraordinary strength. The old doctor, Nelder, tells him that the water is an ancient evil, somehow alive--and it likes Mike. Enthralled by the horrid dreams conferred by the water, Mike now attacks his girlfriend, Lindy, whom he phones for help before drinking the water, and the trucker's son, Doot, who has also helped him. He mutilates the hapless Lindy, breaks Nelder, revenges himself bloodily on Aitch and Mike, then threatens Doot--who, somehow, acquires the water's powers and rips Mike apart while himself remaining uncontaminated by the evil. Jeter can write, and his tightly controlled individual scenes succeed, often handsomely. But the overall picture--the slender plot, the repulsive yet uninteresting atrocities, uncertain character motivations, and the improbable desires of the sentient spa--doesn't add up. Gripping in patches, then, but the patches conceal a number of leaks. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
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This review is from: Wolf Flow (Hardcover)
The editorial review above really ought to contain a spoiler warning, so completely does it reveal the plot of this novel. Many of Jeter's usual trademarks are here, such as the generally unsympathetic characters and dirt-under-the-nails setting, but this time things seem rather slight and under-explored. It's rare that any book could use another hundred pages so in that sense this is a rare book indeed, since there are plenty of areas the author needed to expand upon (although not necessarily explain, as the mysterious nature of this thin slice of horror is very effective). The denouement rushes in as rapidly as the car from which Mike is tossed into the desert, exacerbated by the breakneck speed of Jeter's prose, as crisp and sharp as any of the scalpels here used to gruesome effect. Stephen King would probably have taken 1200 pages to tell this tale, spelling everything out along the way; K.W. Jeter may have leaned too far the other way, shaving more from his story than was healthy for it. A nose above the usual horror fiction, but not Jeter at his nerve-jangling best.
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