The Devouring by Simon Holt 1/81

Hi all! My first book review for the site! Woo Hoo! I hope I did this right. =D Please enjoy!

When Reggie finds an old journal and reads about the Vours, supernatural creatures who feast on fear and attack on the eve of the winter solstice, she assumes they are just the musings of some lunatic author. But soon, they become a terrifying reality when she begins to suspect that her timid younger brother might be one of their victims.

Risking her life and her sanity, Reggie enters a living nightmare to save the people she loves. Can she devour own her fears before they devour her?

Bone-chilling, terrifying, thrilling...what are you waiting for?

The Devouring by Simon Holt is book one of an ongoing series. It is about the Vours, demonic beings who inhabit the bodies of children who are wracked with fear on Sorry Night or the eve of the Winter Solstice, the only night of the year where they can come from their plain of existence into ours where they then will live out the rest of their lives of the human they inhabit.

This book was totally AWESOME! I literally picked it up and didn’t put it down until the last page.

The main character Reggie is a horror enthusiast with her best friend Aaron, and comes across a journal that is just the right kind of creepy they like. She reads it to her little brother, Henry, as a bedtime story, but he scares easily. The journal, which she assumed was just a story, scares Henry badly. What she does not realize that reading that to her little brother starts her (with help from her friend Aaron) on a journey of self-discovery as well as helps her see that things are not as they appear.

Simon Holt brings to the plate the different themes of abandonment throughout the story, as well as the love a sister has for a brother and betrayal.

This book is highly recommended and if we’re rating books, then I’d give this a 5. It is for pure enjoyment of some damn fine story telling, getting a tad bit scared and rooting for Reggie as she does what she needs to do to get the job done!

Song of Kali (7/81)

I generally think horror stories have one central criteria: scare me. Characterization can be nice, as can dialogue or style, but in a horror novel those aspects should be subordinate to the author's talent at freaking me out.

And whatever its flaws, Song of Kali manages to achieve an almost brutal atmosphere of dread. This dread centers on the Indian city of Calcutta, to which the protagonist Robert Luczak, along with wife and newborn, has travelled in search of the renowned Bengali poet M. Das. That Das has a new poem or that Harper's is wanting to publish excerpts and has funded Luczak's trip would be entirely unremarkable if not for the fact that Das has been dead for nine years.

Though warned about Calcutta, Luczak is not prepared for what he finds when he arrives. The Calcutta in Song of Kali is a nightmare city to rival any in horror, where the combination of teeming humanity and abject poverty yield a place where the violence is barely concealed. So skillful is the portrayal that what violence does take place seems only representative, as if the reader knows that the same terror is repeated countless times just beyond the reader's sight. It is this quality that lends the novel such an oppressive sense of dread, even before much of anything happens.

Soon, Luczak meets a scared and shifty young man who tells what he knows of the poet M. Das, a story too wild to believe, involving members of a dangerous cult that may have their own designs regarding the poem. By degrees does the trap close around Luczak, bringing him and his family into danger, one Luczak seems utterly unprepared to handle.

Admittedly, the novel is not without its flaws. It edges rather close to racism. Its portrayal of the struggle between good and evil seems to draw the line between those two forces right along the Western/Indian border, a point that Simmons chooses to emphasize about halfway through the novel and which is further underscored by having every Indian character be basically obnoxious, treacherous, or both.

Orientalism aside, there are a few other flaws, such as that the main character is somewhat unsympathetic and the nature of the supernatural threat left a little too vague. However, with the strong atmosphere of dread present in the city of Calcutta, it makes for a pretty solid horror novel.