The Keeper (Mass Market Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her assured but overstuffed horror debut, Langan lovingly crafts the struggling town of Bedford, Maine, its unlucky inhabitants and the troubling history of the town's shuttered paper mill, before tearing it all to bloody pieces. Bedford is haunted by the beautiful Susan Marley, a damaged young woman who wanders the streets and never speaks a word, stirring "feeling[s] of something undone, something quite wrong, at the sight of her." Those feelings are strongest in Susan's maladjusted little sister, Liz, wracked with guilt over Susan's fate; their mother, who refuses to acknowledge her wayward daughter's existence; and alcoholic high school teacher Paul Martin, who once had an affair with Susan. Susan's fall to her death in the final, rain-soaked days of winter triggers a series of events that bring the buried secrets of the town to terrifying reality—people and animals rise from the dead, and a spirit of homicidal rage grips the living. Fighting to survive, Langan's characters come brilliantly to life, their inner conflicts rendered in sharp but exhausting detail at once expansive and constricting, slowing the narrative to a crawl just before it whips into frenzied, graphic violence. This is horror on a big scale, akin to the more ambitious work of Stephen King, and though Langan's enormous imagination can slow her narrative, this effective debut promises great things to come. (Oct.)
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Review

"it’s hard to put down..." -- Washington Times

"recalls Edgar Allan Poe" -- Washington Times

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: HarperTorch; First Edition edition (August 29, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006087290X
• ISBN-13: 978-0060872908
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 4.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (59 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #30,723 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sarah Langan is a Major New Talent, September 27, 2006

By	Thriller Lover (Las Vegas, Nevada) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

I typically read over two-hundred novels a year, and THE KEEPER is one of the best written debuts I've read in 2006. This is a top-shelf effort.

The quality of the writing in this novel is simply superb. It's hard to believe that Langan is a first-time novelist. Her prose is both vivid and compelling. Langan has a real gift for characterization and all of the people in this book really came alive for me. In the end, I made an emotional investment in the story and characters of THE KEEPER, which is something that rarely happens with most books I read.

The high quality of Langan's writing compensates for the somewhat creaky plot. This is a relatively slow-paced novel, with a great deal of prose devoted to the inner conflicts of multiple characters. If you're looking for fast moving suspense story, you will probably be disappointed with this novel. There isn't a great deal of action in this novel until the final few scenes.

THE KEEPER is essentially a well crafted literary novel with supernatural overtones. It is more of a spooky read than a thrilling one. You either like this type of novel or you don't. I enjoyed it throughly, and I eagerly look foward to Langan's future books. If she learns to tighten her plotting a bit, she could become the next Peter Straub in my opinion.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Impressive Debut with a (Nearly) Fatal Flaw, December 1, 2006

By	Maria Alexander "The Sweetpea of Darkness" (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was very excited to read Langan's book, because female horror writers are special for a lot of reasons. The first chapter absolutely knocked it out of the park. She is great at building dread, and the idea of a town haunted by a woman is very original. While I prefer prose that's something akin to prose poetry, Langan's book has strong, solid writing that worked well for this bleak, frightening story.

The only problem was that about 3/4 into the book everything ground to a halt for me. As realistic as they were, the characters never felt very likable. So, when Very Bad Things started happening to them, I lost interest in the story. I suspect it was because the characters were already dead in many ways and therefore it felt over the top. I soldiered on because a friend of Langan's had loved the book so much that I wanted to give it a fair read. Ultimately I liked the ending and was glad I got there, but that was a difficult bridge to cross.

That said, I suspect future books by Langan will shine even more brightly. I'll definitely be staying tuned!

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Promising, but not fully realized. , September 17, 2007

By	C. Gilbert "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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I'd actually more or less given up on horror novels as a genre. While there are a few contemporary horror writers that I enjoy, I have given up the steady diet of supermarket horror that I read as a teenager. However, I made an exception in this case and actually ordered the Langan book from Amazon. This is largely because a great many of those "few contemporary horror writers" who I still read published hugely glowing blurbs about The Keeper. Peter Straub credited her with combining a "genuinely poetic sensibility" and a "taste for horror's most bravura excesses". Ramsey Campbell praised the quality of the prose. With chops like these, it almost seemed as though I had to love the book.

Probably unsurprisingly, I didn't love it. I didn't hate it either. Honestly, if I *had* just picked it up at the supermarket somewhere in upstate NY then I probably would have actually been quite pleasantly surprised. Langan isn't at all a bad writer, and seems to have a dab hand at the kind of real little details that generally work very well in horror and supernatural fiction. Liz was often very likable, and I could easily visualize her in her surroundings.

The problem was that even though she got the verisimilitude right, Langan somehow didn't succeed in making me care about the characters. I suspect that she tried to draw the story too widely. I needed to care about the town as much as I cared about the main characters. And that never came together. She might have done better to make it a claustrophobic family story. I suspect that by narrowing the focus, Susan may have been more genuinely frightening. The wider scope on the whole town meant that Langan resorted to pretty typical horror tricks-- vicious dogs, giant spiders, yadda yadda. It kind of felt like pastiche, and the rest of the work didn't really deserve pastiche.

All this said, The Keeper is a first novel. And it probably even counts as a first novel with a fair degree of promise. There's enough in here for me to want to keep an eye on her work and see where she goes.