Rating: 
Summary: Horror for young and old alike
Review: Twenty years ago in the desert of Palmetto, CA a gruesome act took place. People died, towns burned, and evil was subdued. Now after two decades the evil is calling again.At the time, three teenagers committed an act that they felt would quell the evil and stop the demon. After living through their adolescence with savage hallucinations and hideous nightmares of that night the evil summons them back to finish what they started. Using flashbacks, waking dreams, and psychiatric interviews with the participants taken at the the time of the "crime", Clegg weaves a complex and graphic thriller. Maybe a little too complex. As the scenes kept flashing back and forth from past to present and from real to imaginary I found myself getting lost in the shuffle. The chapters are short and note when and where they start off, but some of shifts are sudden and not very clear. I was debating on whether to give it 3 or 4 stars due to some of the jerky pace and somewhat sophmoric writing, but then I realized that the book is probably meant more for readers in their teens and early twenties. Although older horror fans would definately appreciate this very discriptive book, I feel that the younger adult crowd would thouroughly absorb it. It reminds me of reading King, Koontz, and Saul when I was a teenager.
Rating: 
Summary: Douglas Clegg scared me -- and I loved it
Review: I grabbed up You Come When I Call You after having heard this book compared to all kinds of other bestselling horror novels I loved. And it did not disappoint me! I got shivers from the first few pages, and loved the mix of dreams and terrors, where all the people in the book were never sure if seeing really was believing. What I found interesting about Clegg's story was that all the gruesomeness was mainly depicted in dreams, while the real violence was minimal. It built up suspense for what the people, mainly Charlie, Alison, and Peter, were going to face later on. What sets this one apart from so many horror novels is the writing. It was intricate but it still made for a page turning story. When they finally tell what one act they did that set it all in motion again years later, it made sense that the horror was inside of them waiting to come out. I'm not giving anything away by saying this because you know this early on in the story. I am going to go grab his books Halloween Man and Mischief. Douglas Clegg is one writer I won't forget.
Rating: 
Summary: It's No Halloween Man
Review: Anyone thinking about reading this because they've read Clegg's amazing Halloween Man be aware: This is a very graphic and gory novel. Beyond that it's decent. The plot is complex, the characters finely - if graphically - drawn. The narrative is, as some have said, all over the place but this isn't a bad thing. My biggest complaint is that by the time we get to the ending we've already been so desensitized to the violence and horrors present in the rest of the book that it really fails. Plus, the last few chapters just drag on and on as they approach the showdown with it. Clegg's a talented man and sure to be huge. But not with this book. For those who have read the book: Was the Awful Thing really any more awful than most of the other stuff that happened in the town? Compared to some of the other stuff they were involved in, the Awful Thing was tame. It even made sense.
Rating:
Summary: You won't be disappointed!
Review: I thought YOU COME WHEN I CALL YOU was a thoroughly engaging and enjoyable read. I love the horror genre, but I'm easily bored by the usual run-of-the-mill stuff, the type that you read and read, hoping for the payoff that never quite comes. This story grabbed me right off the bat! I'm a collector of books, so my signed, limited edition of this novel was a double treat in that the book is a truly a beautiful edition and the story is top notch. For me, this novel is one of those rare finds, the kind that you hate to see come to an end.
Rating: 
Summary: No Peter Straub
Review: I was expecting a lot from this book, after all Clegg has been compared with Straub and King. Maybe I was expecting too much because this is a seriously disapponting read. The plot is confusing, the narrative all over the place and crucially it's not scary at all.
Rating:
Summary: Think Exorcist Meets It
Review: This is quite a chilling tale, told rather effectively. A demon stopped by children and haunts them as adults may sound like an easy comparison to Stephen King's IT, but thats where it stops. Douglas gets more gruesome here, drawing you in slowly into these four kids lives then and now, weaving a tight web around you without you even noticing until you can't put the book down, you have to learn what the "awful thing" they did was. This is my first venture into Clegg's work and I daresay, not my last. Douglas, you have made me a fan.
Rating:
Summary: Clegg keeps getting better...
Review: Doug Clegg has a distinctive voice and style that gets better with each book I read. I devoured YOU COME WHEN I CALL YOU, savoring the lyrical prose and shivering at passages so real they slithered off the page. The characters were both compelling and believable, often doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. As the book progresses, we discover the nightmare which determined the course of their lives, and follow their twenty-year journey to its final, breath-taking conclusion. For visceral horror, no one does it like Doug Clegg. I'm anxiously looking forward to reading more of his work.
Rating:
Summary: Shallow and repetitious
Review: I expected so much more than the re-done and over-done blood and guts that fills this book. The best part was the two older women in the boarding house. They are described well and in detail where the other characters just come up short. This is a sci-fi/alien invading plot that focused on one town out west. The children involved live to their adulthood plagued by the horrors they saw one summer. Now the alien is back to finish what she started. If you can make it through the first half, (that's a big IF), the second half is a bit more interesting. Good Luck if you give this book a chance. I would not read it again and I wish I never read it the first time.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Horror Novel
Review: This is my second Douglas Clegg book. I recently read his short story collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, and was sufficiently impressed with his writing to want to seek out one of his novels. Now that I've read one, I think I'm going to have to go out and buy everything else he's written. I've been a big fan of the horror genre since I read Stephen King's Pet Sematary when I was eleven. A list of my favorite authors would have to include King, Peter Straub, Ray Bradbury, Robert R. McCammon, Clive Barker, Dan Simmons, T.E.D. Klein, Dean Koontz, Joe R. Lansdale, and now Douglas Clegg. I decided to read You Come When I Call You because it had just been published, and because I had read reviews comparing it to Straub's Ghost Story and King's It (two of my all-time favorites). Having now read the book in question, I'd have to say that it's not as good as either of those, but it's still a hell of a good read, and still worthy of five stars. (Another book that I was reminded of while reading it was Stinger by Robert R. McCammon). In You Come When I Call You, Clegg tells a story of childhood friends reunited in the present by a shared experience in their past--an experience so visceral and unrelenting that it continues to live on in their hearts and in their tormented waking dreams. The novel is divided into five parts which alternate between the story of Peter, Alison, and Charlie's last summer of childhood in the desert town of Palmetto, California, 1980 and the fallout of that summer in the present day. This technique of alternating between the characters as adults and children is probably the novel's strongest similarity to It. It's a great narrative device, because I found that reading about the characters' pasts made me want to know more about their futures and vice versa. One of Clegg's themes in the book is how good and evil aren't opposite forces, but rather parts of the same whole. He seems to be saying the same about the past and the present. The novel is also similar in its structure to Bram Stoker's Dracula. The narrative is woven together from a bunch of disparate sources: journal entries, taped interviews, and third person narration. In the beginning, I found this a little distracting. I felt that I didn't know enough about the characters and had a hard time relating to them as a result. But once I was on page 60 or 70, I felt the various forms of narrative had gelled together into a cohesive whole. From that point on, I just couldn't put the book down. The novel's similarity to Ghost Story is mainly one of plot: there's a group of friends haunted by an event they took part in in their youth, having to do with a beautiful young woman who is more than she at first appears to be. I didn't feel that Clegg's style was very similar to Straub's. It's more visceral and gut-level, and probably less elegant (though I don't mean that as a put-down). Straub is one of my favorite stylists. He's hard to beat. With Clegg, I feel the beauty of his writing is more in the momentum he develops in his story-telling, and in the ease with which he seems to do it. My only real complaint was that I felt I didn't get enough of the charcters' childhoods. Just when I thought they were getting really interesting as characters, the novel switched back to the present and later just summarily dealt with the concluding events of the summer of 1980. I would have particularly liked to have read more of the romance between the teenaged Peter and Alison. Still, it's a great horror novel, and I highly recommend it. A really good summer read.
Rating:
Summary: Overall, A Great Read
Review: This is the first Clegg Book I've read (after much enjoying a couple short stories of his; one online, and one in Cemetery Dance Magazine.) Clegg has a strong and wonderful imagination, and created a pretty good book with it here. The book covers a span of 20 years and is told in no particular order; this is kind of annoying but forgiven for the suspense it creates and the ability to keep your mind engaged as you read it. It does have some small irritants (Characters given names such as "the Juicer" and "the Bone" is rather childish and obnoxious), and I was annoyed by a faux newspaper clipping that read NOTHING like a newspaper clipping--Clegg obviously never took any classes in journalism. I also recall how I was struck by the particularly strong characterization of Peter in his youth (the best developed character in the book), but how weak and unlogical the characterization of Peter as an adult. Dispite the aformentioned technical errors, this book made an exceptional read. I recommend it to any horror fan. It is unfortunate to think that many of those errors could have been avoided if Clegg would have ended up with a better publisher--Leisure does a commendable job, but while his heart is in the right place, Don D'auria does a less-than-ideal job as an editor.
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