by Allen Lee Harris
1988 Bantam
Slow, overlong, mild, rural Omen style story. Years ago, a girl is raped and ritually tattooed. She becomes pregnant, and now years later a mysterious orphan comes to town.
I stuck with the twelve plus hours of audio hoping for some payoff, but the intro is the most horrific part of the story. There's a moderately effective Satanic Sunday School scene, but that's offset by lengthy theological musings and piles and piles of nothing.
The prose is well written enough, but the length didn't add atmosphere, characterization, or even padding. It was if the author didn't want to write a horror novel and was procrastinating by going on about small town life and the nature of biblical allegory for hundreds of pages. This was the first time I turned up the speed on Audible to get through it.
It dips it's toe in Southern Gothic, but the small town secrets are baked into the premise and nothing shocking is revealed. Even when we get to the "horror", it's a couple of off-page incidents of implied violence.
And check out the other books from the fine folks at Capricorn Literary, who were kind enough to send me a download code.
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