Rating: 
Summary: Clegg's psychological masterpiece
Review: This is Douglas Clegg's psychological masterpiece. A book with haunted characters, haunted story and hanuted ending. This book is so mysterious and dark that you actually read it without realizing when you come to he end. It is so good. What a great writer.
Rating:
Summary: Atmospheric chiller
Review: When 28-year-old narrator Nemo Raglan's father is brutally murdered, Nemo returns to his island home for the first time in a decade. Why isn't exactly clear; he was fond of his father and close to his younger brother and sister, but for some reason he hasn't much spoken to them or seen them in years.
Their mother ran off when Nemo was nine and nothing has been heard from her since. She was an exotic creature and never really accepted by the insular islanders. His sister, Brooke, still lives on the island; his brother, Bruno, hasn't found his path yet, but he's only 23. Not that Nemo's life is so great - he wrote a novel a few years previously, but has nothing in the works and no great career. No reason, really, why he shouldn't have visited his father before he was so horribly killed in the family's old smokehouse.
Clegg builds his story incrementally and Nemo's narration has an eerie affect; an unevenness, almost a stutter. He adds details, then leaves great holes, or wanders off the subject, even contradicts himself, but in small ways. This is annoying at first, as if the author had lost his place and his editor had fallen down on the job, but persevering readers will be rewarded. The atmosphere builds as chunks of childhood come back - to haunt. And some kind of ghost stalks the rambling old Raglan house at night, unless it's just the increasingly unbalanced Brooke.
Then there's the Brain Fart - a week in the children's lives that went missing somehow - they all had fevers, some kind of illness, and they've made something of an uneasy joke of it since. And there's the Dark Game, a weird imagination-meditation game taught to them by their war-hero father who used it to keep himself going as a POW.
The details of the murder emerge gradually, painting an increasingly horrible picture, alongside the stranger and stranger details of the children's almost claustrophobic island lives. Clegg ("The Infinite") heightens the suspense as he sparely constructs a creepy New England atmosphere, composed of old families with old secrets, old buildings with forgotten corners and convincing, intense characters. Some elements are predictable (in a satisfying way) and the climax pulls out all the stops. Scarily good.
Rating:
Summary: Clegg's Masterpiece
Review: When a good author writes their masterpiece of a novel, it is truly a fascinating experience for the lucky reader. Mr. Clegg has given us, what I feel, to be his best work yet (and I'm sure not the last). The Hour Before Dark is at once mysterious, intriguing and compelling. He lures you down the path of pages, teasing you just enough so you must keep flipping pages, damn the risk for papercuts!I delve into the haunted world of Nemo as the mysteries unraveled and the tensions heightened. I could not put this book down.
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