Nightshade

Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Review: This is the first time that I have read John Saul and I was really captured! Nightshade kept me interested all the way through. I must admit that the "bad guy" was revealed too soon for me. There was still a lot of book left to read and I didn't know how he was going to keep it going, but Saul managed to keep me interested until the end. And to speak of the end, it really turned around and shocked me. It changed my mind of him revealing the killer too early. Great Book, I have bought three more today!

Rating:
Summary: NightShade
Review: Okay this book was the bomb! It totally made me get the chills. Out of a bunch of his books this one left me puzzled and amazed the most. I had 2 read it twice to take all of it in it was so great! Read it!

Rating:
Summary: John Saul must have peaked......
Review: Don't read this book if you find topics such as Alzheimer's disease and sexual abuse of children less than entertaining. There is alot of ugliness in this book, not the mystical eeriness that John Saul ususally projects. The plot also moves way too slow. And it's not particularly scary either. Mysterious perhaps, but not frightening. John Saul's earlier works are so much better. I hope this doesn't mean he's losing his creativity.

Rating:
Summary: Truely Shocked
Review: I cannot believe the number of good reviews this *horrible* book received. I have to confess that this is my first John Saul, but after the trite subject matter and tedious writing style ("his body began to respond to her touch") of Nightshade, I don't dare read another. DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME.

Rating:
Summary: Boring and repetitive
Review: This is the first John Saul book I have read. I can only hope his other books are better than this one. If not, I really don't see how he could have sold so many books.

The story opens intrigueingly with a flashback to a nightmareish episode of child abuse. However, it descends into a standard tale of((((Spoiler)))) a woman with a split personality. Her dead sister's "ghost" begins to take over and start killing members of her family. This "ghost" is able to to overpower other people very quickly, but it is never explained how this rather slightly built woman is able to do this.

An annoying aspect of the writing is how the author has the characters hear or see something, then quickly say "No! This can't be happening! This isn't possible!" These repetitive exclamations got very boring.

Having read many Stephen King and Dean Koontz stories, I had hope this author's writing would be along those lines. However, if this book is representative of Mr. Saul's writing, then he is clearly inferior to those writers.

Rating:
Summary: Soul turning
Review: John Saul is a master of macabre suspense. This book hence is a thriller first of all with a series of crimes and the search for the criminal. But it is a lot more. It is the description of the ideology of a small city in New England. You find the tribes, the hostilities, the loves and the divisions of a small society, along various lines : social lines like rich and poor ; historical lines like the founding families and the others ; political lines like the families who control the city and the others ; and even cultural lines like those who respect humane ways and those who only abide by biassed ideas and the local grapevine. And yet this book goes a long way beyond. It uses some ghost to reveal, little by little, the deepest past of the « criminal ». The ghost is haunting the criminal with nightmares and even manipulation. The ghost is invading the whole environment of the criminal and putting things right her own way, that is to say taking away from the criminal, her own sister, all the things she got due to the death of that particular ghost : a son, a husband, a family, a house, etc. The ghost is on a vengeful road and she will never be taken away from it. And this book still goes farther by using a fundamental theme in John Saul's writings : the theme of brutalized and sexually assaulted kids. This dimension gives John Saul's novels a very poignant taste, the taste of some sickness that pervades our society, a sickness that will probably never end because the victims of such bad treatments are oblivious of them as soon as they can escape them, by growing for example. Memory is such a short-term business. And often these lost memories will be embedded into some innocent strangers later on through some kind of unconscious transfer from the perpetrator onto this stranger in the mind of the grown-up victim. In this particular novel, the line is demultiplied and the various threads are intricately entertwined. That gives a deep and strong pageturner that we can only put down when the last page is turned. It is a book for those who like compulsive reading. And the main lesson is that there is no escape in front of a ghost that will never be killed in anyway and that will possess any living person who will fit her desires. Ghosts are eternal and life is always a necessary coexistence with one or several ghosts and we have to learn how to survive with them in the background. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Parus universities II and IX.

Rating:
Summary: Trite writing revisited
Review: Mr. Saul's writing style is good, but rather trite. It begins as a ghost story, then near the end he does a twist on the movie "The Three Faces of Eve," which is an adaption of a non-fiction book. It seems that he saved on writing time by reusing worn-out phrases that become tiresome by the conclusion.

A paragraph filled with sad and glaring errors appears on Page 236 of the hard-bound edition. One of the supporting characters, Conroe, states that he did much browsing on the Internet and reviewed the medical records of Joan Hapgood. In addition, he checked birth certificates "of every state in the East."

Medical records are totally sealed, requiring the patient's permission before they may be shown to another doctor. Accessing that information on the Internet is impossible. Birth information is likewise sealed, requiring proof of the individual's identity before they may be released.

Saul's depiction of his characters makes them to be wooden figures, with no individual identity.

My sympathies to the young readers who never encounter the great writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, or Ray Bradbury.

Rating:
Summary: Triteshade!
Review: A 15-year-old boy, Matt Moore, is psychologically lynched by his friends and acquaintances because they all think he deliberately shot his stepfather while on a coming-of-age deer hunting party. The tragedy is triggered when the boy's mother idiotically demands and gets her way to permit her Alzheimer's-suffering, hatred-spewing mother to move into their house rather than being given proper care in a nursing home. All hell breaks loose after that. If grandma hadn't come to live with them, would they have remained a happy family with dad still alive? Why can't Matt's mother see that her decision is breaking up her family? Why doesn't she realize grandma should get professional treatment? You might find out after this message from our sponsor. [Organ fadeout to commercial.]

The only frightening part of this book are the townspeople - how quick they are to turn on the boy because he is the mere stepson of Bill Moore. Even though Bill had raised Matt as his very own child, Matt's friends, even his girlfriend, immediately become his enemies, passing judgment on him before any solid evidence is found to indict him. Instead, they allow the bigoted philosophy of one of the town leaders, "If you know the father, you know the son. The apple never falls far from the tree," to sway them. Since no one knows the identity of Matt's real father, that tired old saw is suddenly used as words of truth through which they can ignorantly judge Matt. It hardly seems a whole town would go so suddenly ballistic against a boy who is the local football star and all-around good guy!

There were just too many inconsistencies and trite plot lines to make this book scary and believable. I gave it a two-star rating only because I have faith Saul is going through a slump and has two or three good novels to write before his career is over. Hope I'm right!

Rating:
Summary: Brain Candy (and black licorice at that)
Review: It's a quick read that has some interesting plot twists, but overall it's not even good brain candy. Saul has been on a downslide since Second Child, the book where his writing peaked. It's ironic then that Nightshade is a poor attempt to bank on Second Child by stealing its premise. Saul's prose is stale at best in Nightshade, but more often his writing is downright painful (I was quite ill at the thought of having to read yet another passage about Matt's mood matching the dark sky or gee, this time it's in opposition to the sunny sky). The biggest change Saul has made to his formulaic stories in the last decade is he no longer names a character in every book Jeff.

I'm still addicted to Saul, but I refuse to buy any more of his books until he can write something that matches Second Child or some of his other late 80s books. Until then, you'll find me at the public library.

Rating:
Summary: Fast Read-Surprise Ending
Review: I just finished reading Nightshade and I really enjoyed it. If you are looking for a Nobel Prize winning piece forget it but if you just feel like reading a fun book, this is it!! Sometimes I don't feel like reading a book with a message, I want to just sit down and relax and read a book that makes me not want to stop reading until I get to the end. You don't want to put this one down because there are so many twists and turns that you have to find out what is going on. Enjoy!!