Rating: 
Summary: If you don't like this book, you are a fool.
Review: This book is good. People who complain about it "not having a plot" are probably the same kind of people who complain about abstract art "not being a picture of anything." This is the twenty-first century, folks...nothingness is our very idiom...an idiom which is engrossingly and ingeniously explored by Mr. Searcy's book. Therefore, if you at all value your status as a citizen of the Planet Earth, you will purchase this book immediately.
Rating:
Summary: My, but this was a good book.
Review: This book sure was good. I read the whole thing. While i was reading it I thought to myself, "Boy, this is a good book." And now that i am done, I think pretty much the same thing.
Rating:
Summary: Not for the ADS-afflicted
Review: This is a wonderful piece of writing. It is Camus possessed by Magritte. It is is no less than a highly perceptive and introspective intelligence talking about the cold and fearful apects of human existence. It is oddly funny and scary at the same time. But it requires your work and your attention. It IS a horror story, but so non-formulaic as to render it almost non-generic. If you enjoy a subtle writer who communicates touch, taste, smell and sight in new and meaningful ways, forces you to think about your own inner darkness, and who tells a very interesting tale in the bargain, then this is for you.
Rating:
Summary: Sinister Stuff
Review: This is the best horror novel I've read since Ghost Story. Val Lewton fans will probably like it, but people preferring the sledgehammer aesthetics of, say, Lucio Fulci, will not. It's eminently creepy and sinister stuff. Somehow, the author manages to be maddeningly vague and richly visual all at once. There's so much great stuff in this book. It's destined to be a classic. The first paragraph alone is worth the price of admission. Don't miss it.
Rating: 
Summary: Extraordinary Dullness
Review: Vague, confused, and unbelievably tedious, Searcy's book
fails both as a conventional horror story (the hackneyed
concept of the deceptively benign exotic plant which rids
the neighborhood of gophers but brings far worse dangers
in its wake might have made a somewhat tired short story,
but it certainly cannot survive being dragged out to nearly
230 pages) and as a metaphor for loneliness or paranoia or
aging (the author is remarkably inconsistent in the directions
in which he tries to lead us). Most of the time Searcy is
writing darkly ominious clues about something menancing which
may be lurking just on the other side of the fence or outside
the window or on the porch of the house next door. It may
be responsible for the eccentric behavior of the elderly
neighbor or the convulsive fits of the little girl or the
freak changes in the weather or the determination of the
protagonist to remove the furnishings from his house. On
the other hand, all of these elements may be left pretty much
unexplained at an ending where nothing is tied together, so
that we feel that we have been given a series of meaningless
red herrings as a substitute for a story.
Rating: 
Summary: CREEPY NOT HORRORIFIC
Review: Webster defines "horror" as a "strong feeling caused by something frightful or shocking." I can't say I ever had any such strong feelings reading this book; the feeling was more of a general creepiness, of something evil bubbling under the surface. I kept reading because I wanted to find out what it was.There are no monsters or murderers in the story, instead the "ordinary horror" here is more or less a gnawing feeling of menance. It all starts when the book's main character, Mr. Delabano, a 70-year-old widower, mail-orders an exotic plant to rid his rose garden of gophers. As the plant grows, so does the dread. Nothing overt, it's more of a MOOD of evil, than any particular mode: a dead animal in the gutter, a neighbor child who intuits an evil presence, the glow of a backyard grill, all have a general air of malice. But what does it all amount to? What does it all mean? Though I enjoyed the moodiness of the writing and the idea that even the most mundane circumstances and every-day things can inspire feelings of fright, I found myself wanting something more to happen, so overall, I was disappointed with the story.
Rating:
Summary: Stylish, effective and terrifying
Review: What a wonderful book! A true modern version of a classic "ghost" story but so much more, evoking the spirit of Robert Aickman and Alain Robbe-Grillet, among others, yet entirely its own book. I was a little put off by the convoluted syntax at first -- the style at its worst evokes a parody of lesser New Yorker fiction -- but the author makes his unusual style serve the narrative to an amazing degree, the digressive structure of the sentences reflecting the protagonist's state of mind, the fragmented nature of "ordinary" reality, and ultimately the state of existential dread into which the world descends over the course of this remarkable book. With passages that will stay with me for years -- still reeling from the sheer audacity of the scene with the dinosaur footprint on the playground -- and an unsettling quality that only Aickman and some of the classic ghost story writers have ever captured for me before, I look forward to reading anything else Mr. Searcy writes.
Rating:
Summary: TROUBLING
Review: What's troubling about this novel isn't the story (which begins with sinister potential). It's how the writer, inexplicably, changes course and takes the reader down a path impossible to negotiate. While I don't appreciate the spiteful tone of some of the other reviewers here (we are supposed to be book "lovers," people), I have to say this book is not deserving of a favorable mention.
Rating:
Summary: Worst Book I Ever Read
Review: Yes, this book is number one on my list of worst books of all times. I read the cover and really looked forward to sitting down to read a "terrifying" tale, and was greatly disappointed. The chapters were very disjointed and the whole book was difficult to read. Certainly no character development and the whole plot line with the "little girl next door," went nowhere. I think I could do better justice to the story line, and perhaps I should if this is the drivel that this guy turned out. I can't believe that some people actually liked this book!
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