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Loading... Disappearance at Devil's Rock (2016)by Paul G. Tremblay
  
No current Talk conversations about this book.  remjunior | Oct 2, 2024 |    )1  katri_kr | Jul 13, 2024 | )1 cspiwak | Mar 6, 2024 | ) Carnal.Butterfly | Jan 3, 2024 |  ) MerrylT | May 18, 2023 |
EVERY TOWN has its Devil’s Rock. It might be called something else — “Bunny Man Bridge,” or “Dead Man’s Curve,” or “Devil’s Peak” — but it’s a spot in which the landscape seems somehow imbued with evil, possibly from a supernatural force; its power exists largely in rumor, as cautionary tales pass from teenager to teenager, from generation to generation. Many of these stories feature a unique blending of truth and untruth, vague allusions to “that one kid” who died at that very spot under mysterious circumstances in a time long past.... Instead of looking to place blame on end-all, inhuman sources of pure evil, he creates a story where black-and-white rules don’t apply as well as we think they should.... For Disappearance, the devil is there the entire time, his implied presence dripping off every phrase and lurking in the back of the characters’ minds. Disappearance at Devil’s Rock is ultimately a story of the evil that we are all capable of without any help from a fallen angel wielding a pitchfork. One by one, the characters realize that dark impulses are not caught like a disease but lie locked within everyone, just beneath the skin. Tremblay has managed to drill a well deep past the tropes of the horror/suspense genre and into our real fear of the devil: that he is all of us. Paul Tremblay’s suspenseful new novel takes a close and painful look at how the disappearance of a 13-year-old boy shatters his family.... the novel also offers an abundance of fine writing. Unwelcome visitors to Tommy’s home “eventually float toward the open door like lost balloons.” Tommy’s baseball cap hangs by itself near the back door “like a dead leaf that hasn’t yet fallen.” Tremblay pays close attention to Tommy’s sister, 11-year-old Kate, and after a mother-daughter spat we’re told that “Elizabeth loves this smart-ass version of her daughter so much it breaks her heart, because it’s impossible that she can love equally all the versions of Kate to come.” ,,, Ultimately, Tremblay, who has two children, has written a book about parenthood, one that will be most fully appreciated by others who have known the mingled joy and heartbreak that accompany that greatest of life’s challenges. The most powerful aspect of Disappearance, though, is its immediacy. Tremblay doesn't shout or gesticulate. He whispers his tale, punctuating it with the "clicks and whirrs" of an air conditioner or the life-mocking ring of a child's bicycle bell. His characters are rendered vividly and sensitively. The ambience is all shadows. "No good news ever calls after midnight," Tremblay writes early in the book; "Nothing good happens in the middle of the night, right?" wonders one particularly cryptic character near the book's end. Not only are these bookends an example of Tremblay's immaculate storytelling, it hammers home the horror at the heart of Disappearance at Devil's Rock: That sometimes we can't truly see the ones we love until they've faded into the dark. Like the other writers I’ve been reading, Tremblay is most interested in the in-between places, in feelings that are indeterminate and perhaps unknowable, like Tommy’s teenage sense of neither-here-nor-thereness: “Sometimes,” he writes in his diary, “I think that I’m more than halfway disappeared already.” ... And as reality slips and skitters into dark corners, writers like Tremblay keep trying to catch traces of it, in the present and in the past. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
A family is shaken to its core after the mysterious disappearance of a teenage boy in this eerie tale, a blend of literary fiction, psychological suspense, and supernatural horror from the author of A Head Full of Ghosts. "A Head Full of Ghosts scared the living hell out of me, and I'm pretty hard to scare," raved Stephen King about Paul Tremblay's previous novel. Now, Tremblay returns with another disturbing tale sure to unsettle readers. Late one summer night, Elizabeth Sanderson receives the devastating news that every mother fears: her thirteen-year-old son, Tommy, has vanished without a trace in the woods of a local park. The search isn't yielding any answers, and Elizabeth and her young daughter, Kate, struggle to comprehend Tommy's disappearance. Feeling helpless and alone, their sorrow is compounded by anger and frustration: the local and state police have uncovered no leads. Josh and Luis, the friends who were the last to see Tommy before he vanished, may not be telling the whole truth about that night in Borderland State Park, when they were supposedly hanging out a landmark the local teens have renamed Devil's Rock. Living in an all-too-real nightmare, riddled with worry, pain, and guilt, Elizabeth is wholly unprepared for the strange series of events that follow. She believes a ghostly shadow of Tommy materializes in her bedroom, while Kate and other local residents claim to see a shadow peering through their windows in the dead of night. Then, random pages torn from Tommy's journal begin to mysteriously appear--entries that reveal an introverted teenager obsessed with the phantasmagoric; the loss of his father, killed in a drunk-driving accident a decade earlier; a folktale involving the devil and the woods of Borderland; and a horrific incident that Tommy believed connects them. As the search grows more desperate, and the implications of what happened become more haunting and sinister, no one is prepared for the shocking truth about that night and Tommy's disappearance at Devil's Rock. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature American literature in English American fiction in English 2000-LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.72)
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Wikipedia in English
3
Which leads me to the story. Meh. Kind of boring for the most part. The tension didn't really exist, the "supernatural" elements felt like the author trying to be clever when it wasn't really clever it was just misleading, etc. I really liked the end of the novel and the beginning of the novel, but everything in between tasted like plain toast.
I really wished Tremblay had stuck to what made his previous novel so good--a young child's point of view of horrible things that are happening. That is what made Ghosts such a spectacular novel. This felt like a procedural. (