Night Sounds by Warner Lee

Night Sounds
by Warner Lee (B.W. Battin)
1992, Pocket

"Immmmaaaagine the huuuuunger!"

A commercial artist is the sole survivor of a plane crash, and heals two broken legs at his beach house.  He's tormented by visions or hallucinations, those around him fall to Omen style accidents, and a giant scaled creature stalks the town eating animals and people.  He's assisted by a psychic schoolteacher who has visions and can detect lies.

I went in reading this with no idea where it was going, and things stayed that way through most of the book.  Unfortunately, I think Battin did the same writing it.  Writing by the seat of the pants does wonders for getting original horror material, until you try to wrap things up at the end.

Dead Grandma Exposition comes out to explain things, then the evil stuff explains things, and there's exposition-offs and contract negotiations for the last tenth of the book, the end.

Battin uses the time honored method of people repeating scenes back to each other to fill pages.  Someone sees hallucination, someone else sees it, the psychic sees them seeing it, they discuss what they did or didn't see and have interior monologues about, etc.

There's a lot of examples of one of my pet peeves, characters relating things happening to other horror references: it's like something out of a movie; I expected Rod Serling to come out; this must be how werewolves feel.

I appreciated how the story didn't fit into any standard horror cliches, but that goodwill got flushed down the toilet when the conclusion is just page after page of rule-establishment.  The hallucinations (dogmen walking through walls, a spider eating a cat, etc) were interesting, but more cartoonish than horrifying.

This appears to have been Battin's last book of the horror boom, not publishing again that I can find until 2015.