We watch as people in town are growing more and more paranoid, their morals are deteriorating, their sanity is crumbling. We’re dropped right into the craziness from page one and hear about how it came about. The novel builds a little slowly, but I wouldn’t call it a slow burn. Let’s talk about that ending for just a second, without giving anything away. This was really a terrific powerhouse of a novel, pulsing with increasing dread throughout all the way to the bitter, breath-stealing ending.
It seemed a lot like The Mist by Stephen King to me, but once I actually started reading, I saw that it was entirely its own story, having little to do with King’s story.
I wasn’t so sure about the premise here when I started, though Keene has never let me down. But the darkness can still play with their minds. But whatever the darkness is, it’s evil, and a strange homeless man in town seems to have kept the darkness from coming inside of the town. The darkness also seems to be showing things to people when they get close things that scare them sometimes, other times loved ones enticing them to come just a little closer. We have that awakes to find that some sort of darkness has surrounded it from above and at all sides, and anyone who ventures into the darkness never returns, but their screams can be heard from time to time. But…I have found what I would consider my favorite Keene this side of Ghoul, and that would be DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN. So Ghoul has that going for it ON TOP OF being just a terrific novel. Of the books of his I’ve read, I still say Ghoul is my favorite, but much of that is the fact that I just love coming-of-age stories, especially when they’re set back when I was growing up. He’s got some grand ideas about multiple worlds and different dimensions and God and the devil and other gods and creatures and so on. His characters connect with the reader, come across less like the ideas from someone’s imagination but rather like real individuals.
Something I’ve learned along the way with him is that there is a REASON he’s a legend in the horror community. Nowhere near all of it, but a fair amount. I’ve read quite a bit of Keene’s work over the years.
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