Sleep Tight

Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly Scary
Review: The cover of this book, a girl eating an all-day sucker, is misleading. This is the tale of a small town in New York and the horror that comes to visit one day.

Things start when a young boy disappears while sneaking to a local pool. His disappearance is not the last as someone else disappears every day. The manhunt grows but we get glimpses that there is far more than just missing people at stake.

Something is going on in the town and it could affect the world as we know it. Some readers may be a little confused at first but fans of the Cthulhu Mythos and H.P. Lovecraft will recognize some of the imagery.

Finally, the forces of good and sanity pull together for a final confrontation before all hell breaks loose. How it ends will have to be left for the reader to discover. Well-done.


Rating:
Summary: Another very good Lovecraft-take from Costello
Review: There's no one better or anyone who wrote more books on the old, ancient, evil entities from other dimensions than Matthew Costello. Sleep Tight is great. In a small town near NY, children, then adults start disappearing. It all leads to certain individual who wants to bring outer-dimension horrors into our world. Creepy, errie, gory Lovecraft fun. You'll like it alot.

Rating:
Summary: A real TIGHT horror story, with a distinct eighties flavor!
Review: What can I say? SLEEP TIGHT is one of those books that you can read in under 4 hours (it clocks in at 300 pages) and that still leaves you real satisfied after putting it down.

SLEEP TIGHT was published in 1987 at it really has the feel of that time (to me anyway). I can just picture this as a movie, standing in between EVIL DEAD II, Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees (to which there are references) and offcourse Don Coscarelli's PHANTASM (the main baddie here is even called The Tall Man, just like Angus Scrimm!).

The plot is pretty standard supernaturalhorror stuff, with a creature from some other dimension that kills people and has to be stopped. I heard Matt Costello is really big on HP Lovecraft, and his influences show, with an unpronounceable evil and all kinds of tentacle/pseudopodlike things grabbing at innocent victims.

Like I stated earlier, it's fun, just don't except this book, and it's characters to go too deep. To use a cliche, it's almost like a B-movie put to paper(although, once in a while, that's not a bad thing).

There are some minor qualms in that the baddie resembles the PHANTASM movies a little bit TOO much and that the local police buy a little bit TOO easy into the fantastic explainations the professor character is given them (he's a holocaust survivor and kind of the Van Helsing to this story-- I'm afraid to say, all that's been done before also).

However, this kind of horror isn't about originality, but about the kind of feelings it evokes in it's readers. For me it was both nostalgic and scary, and I haven't got any problems with that.

I've recently bought a few of Costello's other works, and I'll be sure to be reading them soon. Stay tuned!