Monday, February 01, 2010

Buried secrets, broken souls, boring story

The Keeper
Sarah Langan

Things are going bad in the small town of Bedford. Its inhabitants are all awful people, but are they to blame for their own shitty natures? Or are they being slowly poisoned by the noxious town with a malignant paper mill at its heart? One young woman, Susan Marley seems to know the town's secrets -- or is she the cause of them? A series of bad events bring the town's secrets to the surface, and life in Bedford will never be the same.

I loved Sarah Langan's followup to this novel, The Missing, so I was interested in reading the book that started it all. I downloaded it on my Kindle and was prepared to be floored. And I was.

Unfortunately, I was floored not by its awesomeness, but by the lack thereof. The Keeper was BORING. There were a ton of characters that kept melding into one another, and I kept forgetting who was who. The first 70% of the book was setting the stage for the final destruction, but I was so bored that, when it came, I was glad to see the destruction come.

In a nutshell: I'm glad I read The Missing first, or else I might not want to read more by this author. As a first novel, however, Langan proves she has the chops to write some truly disturbing horror.

Bibliolatry Scale: 2 out of 6 stars

FTCBS: Back off, I purchased it for my Kindle!





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