From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
I should say up front that I'm not a fan of horror stories and so this was a bit of an experiment, but I'm always interested in reading authors I haven't encountered before, especially if they have anything interesting or new to share, and this book offered something that was first published back in 1985 and was a little bit different from the stuff we tend to see today. It was a quick read, and although I had some issues with it, they were not enough overall to turn me off it.
I appreciated that there were only one or two writing and publishing issues. For example, at one point at the end of a descriptive sentence, there's a closing quote which is wrong, because the sentence was neither speech nor a quote: ...when, Shannon suspected, he was disturbed about something." The ending quote should not be there, but we've all been there, I'm sure! No big deal.
At another point, there was a paragraph describing their first trip to a supermarket, and it began and ended with a contradiction: "They each took baskets" as they entered the store, but then they left it was "With three grocery carts loaded with food supplies..." Disconnect! If they took baskets they should leave with baskets (or bags), otherwise the author ought to have had them take carts at the start! Unfortunately Ruby Jean Jensen died in 2010, so she can no longer fix that. We'll let it live as a memorial to her.
The final one I noticed was a bit of a writing wash: "And the tabletop had beneath it a shadow that seemed, when Shannon glanced away from it, darker than it should have been, as if there were something more beneath it adding its own shadow." It's possible to have a variation in shadow depth, but in this circumstance it stood out to me as being awkward in the circumstances. There was only one light source and the table top shadow could not have been deepened by anything underneath it when there was no other light shining. It's a minor quibble, but one which jumped out at me. Rather like the thing that was hiding! Not that the hiding made any sense, but I let that go. I know what she was trying to say; I just don't think she said it well.
For me, one of the biggest problems with horror stories or hauntings, poltergeists, that kind of thing is that writers always approach them in a terrified way - in that they tend to have the ghosts or evil spirits, or whatever, start out with minor ambigious events where the victims are always talking themselves into believing that nothing really happened, or that there's a rational explanation for what they think they experienced, but to me that makes zero sense. It especially made little sense in this particular novel.
I don't believe in an afterlife, or ghosts or evil spirits, but they make for good stories, and while I can understand how a writer would feel a need to slowly ramp-up the tension and the horror, it's all been done exactly like this so tediously many times before. The thing is that if you dive into that world and pretend for the sake of fiction that it's real, why would demons, ghosts, or spirits actually do that?
Maybe ghosts would behave like the humans they once were and ease into it if they were having fun - like the dead couple in Beetlejuice, for example, because they're supposed to be the spirits of people, but demons? Other monstrous creations? Why would they follow any rules or ramp up anything, when they can go full throttle from the off? Why would they behave remotely like humans?
The premise in this story is that a woman who has lost a young child is offered the opportunity to babysit three young children, the youngest of which is the age of the child she lost. They go to the family retreat in the mountains. The kids lost their mom, and dad can only visit on weekends, so it's just they, the housekeeper, and the evil friends of young Barry, who went through bad experiences in his previous setting where he was abused. Now he's withdrawn. No one knows he was abused by a woman who practiced demon worship.
The whole motivation of young Barry's supernatural 'friends' therefore, is to keep him to themselves and get rid of all competition, which includes Shannon the babysitter, as well as his sister Becky, his brother David, the housekeeper Edna, and even his Aunt and her two kids who come to stay for a while. Why in particular the demons want to rid the house of these other people isn't actually made clear. There's no explicatory backstory at all. The other people in the house are no competition. They're not even aware of the demons to begin with, and the demons are perfectly free to do whatever they want. To me this made no sense.
There was a epilogue which I did not read. I don't do prologues, epilogues, prefaces, introductions, forewords or any of that antique and tedious crap. Chapter one is where I start. I've never regretted it or felt like I missed anything by skipping those - which proves my point! It's possible there was something offered in the epilogue, but rather doubt it.
Barry spends time with the demons playing with, and talking to them. His family just think he's withdrawn and talking to imaginary friends. Barry has some control over the demons, but not much, and they have their own agenda, so when they decide they want the family gone, my question was: why do they not simply suffocate each one in their beds one night? Why the slow burn and the overly-elaborate deaths? Obviously it's because the writer is trying to entertain the reader and slowly jack-up the tension, but to me it made little sense and kept knocking me out of suspension of disbelief as I questioned why they were so lackadaisical in their demonic behavior! It reminded me of the villain in a thriller monologuing until the hero can find a way to defeat him. It's silly and inauthentic.
I let that slide though for the sake of enjoying an older story by someone who writes decently well, and it turned out to be entertaining. It wasn't something that made me want to run out and buy more Ruby Jean Jensen books to read. I may read another of hers down the line somewhere, but I wasn't overly impressed with this. It was however a worthy read overall.
I liked the way the family was put together and the way the author wrote the female characters, especially Becky and Shannon. I enjoyed the evil characters. They were new and different, and believable in many ways.. I liked Barry, although I thought he was a bit limp at times. On the other hand, he was very young, so maybe he was written realistically. I thought the ending was a bit lacking, but it wasn't awful and it lent Barry some weight that seemed to be missing from his character earlier, so all of these things brought the story around for me. Therefore I commend it.
