The Uncanny (Nova Audio Books)

Rating:
Summary: A Pale Ghost
Review: Andrew Klavan is a talented writer who has given us two really exceptional books: "True Crime" and "The Animal Hour." In those books, Klavan created characters and situations that were complex, puzzling, interesting, and original. With "The Uncanny," Klavan attempts to revamp the traditional ghost story by setting it in modern times and giving us "hip" characters like Richard Storm and Sophia Eberling. Somehow, for me, it just didn't work. The setting at the "Bizarre" magazine was novel, but not all that interesting. The ghost story itself was lame and poorly conceived. Although the book has flashes of brilliance, they are far too few, and overall, you're left with a rather unsatisfying ghost story. Read Peter Straub's "Ghost Story" for better chills!

Michael Butts

Rating:
Summary: Is this the same guy who wrote "True Crime"?
Review: I finished "The Uncanny" last night. After a promising start the book became long, mysterious (not in a good way), muddled, and boring. Although there were flashes of good descriptive writing, I didn't feel that the story held together. The characters were vague and uninteresting people. And no final, acceptable explanation of the "why" behind the mystery emerged. Who was Iago? How/why did Storm's movie create him? How did he react when the triptych burned?? Who--or what--was "the Uncanny?" I was left feeling like I'd walked into a private conversation and was never included in what was going on, and ultimately I grew tired of reading and didn't care. Klavan needs to be a little less mysterious in future efforts to hold me as a reader.

Rating:
Summary: Boring
Review: I'd like to preface this by saying that this is the first of anything that I've read by Andrew Klavan; thus, I'm not burdened by Klavan's other novels. Hey, "True Crime" may be a masterpiece, and "Animal Hour" could be fantastic, I don't know. I did read this novel, "The Uncanny", however, and I was very pleased with it.

I profess a weakness (like Storm in the novel) for English ghost stories, so perhaps the novel spoke to me more so than my fellow reviewers here. Overall, I found the book to be well-written and very interesting. It wasn't scary, as some of the others have pointed out, but I don't think Klavan was trying to upstage King here. What he's written is an interesting and entertaining thriller, filled with some clever supernatural / occult additives, and the result is entirely pleasing.

Recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Klavan - The Uncanny
Review: I'll cut to the chase - I was looking for a cheap supernatural thriller. What I got was more intricately plotted yet yielded fewer thrills. I was disappointed.

I've never read anything by Klavan and The Uncanny doesn't exactly inspire confidence. The premise is uninspired - American movie producer who's got some health problems (to say the least) ends up hunting down the answers to an old ghost story in England. It also becomes - of course - a somewhat sappy boy-meets-girl story.

I think what truly bothered me most about the novel was the portrayal of the main character. He lived up to every stereotype of the typical American movie producer. Worse, he adopted these qualities only after the first quarter of the book had passed. As an American (and I acknowledge that many of these traits can be somewhat accurate, but are rarely seen in one single individual) I was put off by the portrayal. The whole John Wayne, movie producer, father-was-a-movie-star-cowboy, protect-the-women, suffer-in-silence hero thing was just a little too over-the-top. And while this character is overdeveloped, the others are quite poorly developed.

I don't think Klavan did himself or his readers any favors by making this more of a "literary thriller". It was just slower and more weighed down.

Rating:
Summary: Klavan - The Uncanny
Review: I'll cut to the chase - I was looking for a cheap supernatural thriller. What I got was more intricately plotted yet yielded fewer thrills. I was disappointed.

I've never read anything by Klavan and The Uncanny doesn't exactly inspire confidence. The premise is uninspired - American movie producer who's got some health problems (to say the least) ends up hunting down the answers to an old ghost story in England. It also becomes - of course - a somewhat sappy boy-meets-girl story.

I think what truly bothered me most about the novel was the portrayal of the main character. He lived up to every stereotype of the typical American movie producer. Worse, he adopted these qualities only after the first quarter of the book had passed. As an American (and I acknowledge that many of these traits can be somewhat accurate, but are rarely seen in one single individual) I was put off by the portrayal. The whole John Wayne, movie producer, father-was-a-movie-star-cowboy, protect-the-women, suffer-in-silence hero thing was just a little too over-the-top. And while this character is overdeveloped, the others are quite poorly developed.

I don't think Klavan did himself or his readers any favors by making this more of a "literary thriller". It was just slower and more weighed down.

Rating:
Summary: I loved it!
Review: I've read the other reviews here. If a book is called " The Uncanny" I guarantee it's of the horror genre. Why everyone expected a "True Crime-ish" novel is beyond me.

Richard Storm, a horror movie producer,leaves Hollywood on a quest to London to see if any of the old ghost stories bare any truth. Is there really life after death? When Richard falls in love with Sophia Endering,an art dealer, he finds more then he was looking for. It's a rollercoaster ride through nazi art theft, ghost stories and "The Devil himself". To much said will give away the surprising twists in the story.

This was a great horror novel!

Rating:
Summary: a spoof ?
Review: Impossible to take seriously as a ghost/horror story, Klavan must be poking fun at the genre with this one. The characters are stereotypes, the love story sappy and the underlying premise way over the top. I was reminded of that episode of The X-Flies (the last of one their seasons) where it made great fun of itself.

It's written well enough to be readable and might have been enjoyable if it hadn't dragged on for so long.

Rating:
Summary: Is this the same guy who wrote "True Crime"?
Review: This book clearly shows that to write a good horror story is a lot more difficult than it seems to be. The author has admittedly piled up cliché after cliché of horror lore, with no other result than a messy heap of clichés. The characters are a real problem: it is very difficult to like them or care about them. They lack depth and everything about them sounds phony. This is one of these books in which the characters are described as something and proved to be something else by facts: Storm is supposed to be a big-shot Hollywood producer, but his films (from what we see of them and as the author himself admits) are sub-Roger Corman. Iago is insistently described as "seductive," but any Batman villain is in fact far subtler and more interesting. The "tick-tick" thing is far more irritating than scary. I found it very difficult to finish this book, because by page 50 I no longer cared. I bought it because I read True Crime and found it excellent entertaiment, but this one has been a major disappointment.

Rating:
Summary: Fun, but not as interesting as hoped...
Review: This book succeeded in being weird while at the same time remaining completely pointless throughout. To make matters worse, it had pretensions of contributing to the serious and well established genre of the ghost story. Of course, how good could any novel be in which the main character is a part time Hollywood producer part-time adventurer named "Richard Storm"? Or sentences such as: "He clasped Sophia against him, felt the warmth of her body there, drank the warmth of her body in with his." This book has "pulp" written all over it. None of this would be so bad if this book were more fun and not so gross and violent.