Looking Glass

Rating:
Summary: Tense and Suspenseful Fiction
Review: A. Matthews aka Rick Hautala's second horror offering is obstensibly a ghost story. A family moves into their dream house to live an idylic existence in the country. Of course it being in the horror genre this doesn't happen, as their place seems haunted.

I said it was obstensibly a ghost story because reading it and thinking back, looking for inspiration for this review I would be just as apt to label it a sociological novel studying the nuclear family of the 21st century. The step-mother and daughter have a strained relationship loaded with friction, the 14(or 15) year old daughter Emily has a barely tolerated relationship with her little brother. The father toils away at a law firm trying to reconcile work and family. If Matthews had given Brenda a career(or implied more detail and described it more) I would have tried to figure out how many families in North America were pretty much excatly as this one is imagined. Two things can happen when parents re-marry and raise a step family, either they gel and cohere in a familiar unit or they break apart at the seams. Matthews does an exceptional job keeping the reader wondering which side of the tight-rope this family is going to land on as he heaps adversity after adversity on them, and relentlessly twists and turns the plot so I don't think anyone can forsee how this one is going to end. Very well done, hopefully Matthew's writing quality remains at this obvious peak in future novels.

Rating:
Summary: Buy this book
Review: I bought this book on a whim, and I'm glad I did. I found the book to be hard to put down, I enjoyed reading it that much. I plan to buy the authors 1st book too.

Rating:
Summary: Buy this book
Review: I bought this book on a whim, and I'm glad I did. I found the book to be hard to put down, I enjoyed reading it that much. I plan to buy the authors 1st book too.

Rating:
Summary: A much better second book
Review: I read A.J. Matthews' first book, The White Room. It was pretty good. but Looking Glass is leaps and bounds ahead of it. The story has a twist on the traditional ghost story that I have never seen done before. The characters are real and likeable, especially Brenda, the heroine. I don't want to give any spoilers away, but the ending will rock you. If you like good original ghost stories, buy this book.

Rating:
Summary: Oh, please.
Review: If readers are rating this "much better" than the previous "White Room", the WR must be realllly bad.

Wordy, trite, a waste of 352 pages.

Rating:
Summary: Really Good
Review: This book was a really good modern horror book. I love horror books of all kinds, and this one is awesome. The only bad part is when in the wife's point of veiw, she has too many mental breakdowns. But other than that, its a really great book with an ending you would never guess.