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New King on the Block

July 30, 2007

The end of a beloved book series can be difficult. I know the Harry Potter crowd must be feeling acutely something I experienced more generally--though not, I would think, any less emotionally--when I realized Stephen King wasn't ever going to be as good at he used to be, at least with regards to the scary stuff. I first remember detecting the downward trend in Gerald's Game and Rose Madder, continuing through Insomnia (meant to be his return to The Shining-level epic horror), and confirmed with double-disappointment The Regulators and Desperation.

But, as everyone in this business knows, there's always more where that came from. Gems can be few are far between, especially in the horror show (witness the execrable, interminable The Ruins, which King called "the equivalent of a triple axel that just misses perfection"). Knee-deep in the sophomore novel from Sarah Langan, however, I'm pretty sure I've found a solid new vein.

Now and later

The Missing, out from Harper mass market in October, is the follow-up to Langan's 2006 debut, The Keeper, which got near-universal praise from reviewers everywhere (including PW). I myself was pretty impressed with The Keeper, about an on-the-skids Maine town that implodes with the help of a deeply damaged young woman, whose death releases a plague of anger. It's a little bloated, but mesmerizing nonetheless, populated with vivid characters who come horribly unraveled, and it garnered her lots of favorable comparison to Stephen King. I liked it quite a bit more than the debut from King's son, Heart Shaped Box, and infinitely more than Cell (the last King novel I've picked up, which I gave up after 150 embarassing pages).

Langan's new one picks up a number of years after the events of The Keeper, in a neighboring town that's being slowly poisoned by the toxic aftermath of the paper mill fire that capped the first book. I'm just 100-some pages in, and already it's topped The Keeper as far as scares, gore and compulsion-to-read; in the past couple days I've caught myself reading on the stairs coming up from the subway, a habit that's caused me several painful spills in the past. I've been unable to get the mad little kid from the beginning of the book out of my head. And I've been having a little trouble getting to sleep.

I wish I was reading it right now.

So if you haven't had your big summer scare yet, time's a wasting: pick up The Keeper, and you'll have a great Autumn follow-up to look forward to--and, if there's any justice, a King-like, decades-long stretch of frighteningly good novels after that.

Posted by Marc Schultz on July 30, 2007 | Comments (3)