The Playgroup : A Novel of Terrifying Suspense

Rating:
Summary: A Creepfest
Review: After twenty-two years since its first publication, this book has not gotten any better. It is marketed as horror but comes off as just strange and confused. The main cast is made up of four toddlers and four mothers. A few menfolk get added to spice things up. Blatantly bad mathematics helps drive one of the premises.

Kids might be more special than when they are adults. They might have more abilities. Truly special kids may seek out other special kids. Maybe everyone in New York actually does use the word bazooly. But what we get are four kids who might be closer than conventionally possible and their slightly off-kilter mothers who arrange the playgroup, a two-hour time slot each day that the kids can get together and not all mothers have to be present.

Might make a nice short story, but the novel is pumped with garbage. One of the key characters makes a comment about a secret government study of gifted kids but it just gets left out in the end. In reading this book it is really hard to wonder where the author really wanted to take this book but I get the impression it missed its destination (who is Lokomo?).

The writing can be crude in places. The mothers seem to have very strange thought processes and keep adding sex to their thought streams. Bazooly gets used a lot. One chapter actually starts with the line, "Holy speculum, it is you!" Not only is this a strange phrase, but the speaker never says anything even remotely similar at any other time in the book.

This one should be left on the shelves.

Rating:
Summary: A Cautionary Creepfest
Review: I found this the most terrifying book since "Rosemary's Baby". Absolutely shattering! Read it, by all means, but in the safest place you know.

Rating:
Summary: Every Mother's Nightmare
Review: It's urban, it's urbane--but most important, it's truly unnerving. Like Stephen King, Alfred Hitchcock, and other masters of the sophisticated nail-biter, Nancy Weber makes this New York story work not just because she writes beautifully, but because she's set it in very real life. Her grownup characters are so keenly observed they seem familiar. The kids in the cast are charming, outspoken, creepily canny. . . and vulnerable. Which is why, when something shocking happens to one of them, we really, really care.