cover image UNBOUND

UNBOUND

Tim Vargo, . . Willowgate, $12.95 (242pp) ISBN 978-1-930008-04-5

Awkward, overheated prose mars Vargo's first horror novel, a clumsy attempt to update the gothic. A desperate young mother flees a forbidding castle with her newborn twins, their monstrous father in hot pursuit. She evades him long enough to hide the infant girl and boy. Taken in by very different families, the children grow up unaware of each other, except for a tenuous dream contact that neither understands. But Nathaniel Thorne, their demonic father, never gives up looking for them. Twenty-one years later, Nathaniel finds his son, Lewis, and takes him to his luxurious castle, where Lewis meets his beautiful "sister," Felicia. (We know she's not the real deal, even if Lewis doesn't.) Nathaniel wants his true daughter for nefarious purposes and uses the clueless Lewis to get her. At one point, while searching the castle for Felicia, Lewis walks (for no good reason) into the darkened end of a hallway and his mind begins "to buck like a horse led too close to the wolves, balking with its eyes turned white in their sockets, face quivering and snorting." Readers must have both the fortitude and the ability to overlook odd details like the fact Felicia has an Adam's apple, that rooms are "modernly decorated" and that, for all his powers, Nathaniel is easily tricked. (Mar. 1)