OUT OF THE NIGHT

Rating:
Summary: This is an awsome book
Review: No single creature scares you this. Expect MANY scares from many frightening monsters in Whalen's prolific imagination transferred to this novel. For information about this author (lots of it) e mail me at [e-mail].

Rating:
Summary: TYPICAL WHALEN. MY KIND OF HORROR
Review: ONCE AGAIN PATRICK WHALEN HAS WRITTEN A BOOK THAT IS HEAD AND SHOULDERS ABOVE THE TRIPE THAT IS PUT OUT BY THE CRITICS FAVORITES, "RICE, SAUL, ECT. TO BAD PUBLISHERS ARE SO DAMN SHORTSIGHTED. I HAVE A DOZEN FRIENDS WHO LOVE THIS GUYS STORIES. WELL READ THE OTHERS IF YOU CAN FIND THEM.

Rating:
Summary: TYPICAL WHALEN. MY KIND OF HORROR
Review: ONCE AGAIN PATRICK WHALEN HAS WRITTEN A BOOK THAT IS HEAD AND SHOULDERS ABOVE THE TRIPE THAT IS PUT OUT BY THE CRITICS FAVORITES, "RICE, SAUL, ECT. TO BAD PUBLISHERS ARE SO DAMN SHORTSIGHTED. I HAVE A DOZEN FRIENDS WHO LOVE THIS GUYS STORIES. WELL READ THE OTHERS IF YOU CAN FIND THEM.

Rating:
Summary: This is an awsome book
Review: Patrick Whalen Kept me on the edge of my seat. I couldn't put it down. Unlike most authors he put vivid pictures of the whole book in my head. I wish I could find the rest of his books.

Rating:
Summary: Patrick Whalen: California's worst nightmare.
Review: Patrick Whalen, Out of the Night (Pocket, 1990)

Much of the geographic detail of Patrick Whalen's novels makes it seem as if this guy lives in the same California everyone else does. Everything else makes it sound like he lives on another planet. If half the things in California happened that Patrick Whalen write about, the state would be deserted. (Some would contend that the election of Sonny Bono is scarier than anything Patrick Whalen has ever written about, though.)

In this case, a public lynching during the nineteenth century is the focal point of the novel's beginning. A number of townsmen band together to hang six outsiders they believe to be responsible for a rash of deaths in the town outside which the strangers are camped. After the lynching, the town experiences a suspiciously high number of suicides, but no one (seems to) connect the dots.

The bulk of the novel takes place a hundred years later, when murders begin again in the same tradition as previously. A ragtag band of protagonists eventually come to the same basic conclusions-that the strangers who were lynched a hundred years previous are back. Not the stuff of good dreams.

A number of the problems that made Whalen's first novel just a touch under the par line are gone here. This book rolls along like a two-ton boulder on a smooth downhill slope. The foreshadowing is subtler, the characters more believable, the climax set up very well. There are a couple of places where predictability rears its ugly head, but such is the case with most horror novels; there are certain characters who always walk around with "kill me" tattooed on their foreheads, and some of those in Out of the Night are no exception. Still, the horror reader will find that an easy (and familiar) enough pill to swallow in the general scheme of things. Now, if only someone would make a movie of this with John Hurt and Denzel Washington.

In my recent kick of late-eighties out-of-print horror novels, this is one of the best I've come across. *** ½