Books by author: Jeff Mariotte

I used to read a lot of horror novels. Up until about 1994, I had read every published novel and story collection by Stephen King and Clive Barker, as well as all of Anne Rice's Vampire and Witch books. I stopped reading them because they got to be boring; there were either major plot problems (particularly with Rice, who can't end a novel to save her life) or the ideas had become uninteresting or derivative. To me, the mark of a good novel in this genre is self-consistency, with reasonable justification of the various plot elements. Dan Simmons usually manages this, and it's why I'm still reading his novels today (though his recent "horror" efforts have been among his weakest).

Jeff Mariotte's novel is okay, but it fails because too much of the plot is only tangentially relevant to the core story. He's got a stock premise: a vague, undefined evil is blooming beneath what is essentially an anarchic trailer park, and three people from different backgrounds come together to try to stop it. There are a couple of wonderful scenes; in particular, I thought Lucy's chase through the valley was very well done, but it is emblematic of the novel's flaws. In my opinion, Lucy is the most interesting character, and she has the best subplots, but in the end, she's completely irrelevant to the story's core, and that frustrates me tremendously. Good ingredients are necessary — but not sufficient — for creating a good meal; you have to use them in the right proportions and they all have to contribute to the whole.