Nightshade by John Saul Paperback Book

Details

Rent Nightshade

Author: John Saul

Narrator: Chet Green

Format: Unabridged-CD

Publisher: Brilliance Corporation

Published: May 2008

Genre: Fiction - Horror - General

Retail Price: $36.95

Discs: 9

Synopsis

There's no such thing as a happy family in John Saul's dark imagination. He made this chillingly clear in Suffer the Children and The Right Hand of Evil, and he deepens this impression in Nightshade, a perfectly macabre tale of a household ripped apart by malevolent forces.

Meet New Hampshire couple Bill and Joan Hapgood and their teenage son, Matt. They have a huge home, many friends, and the glow of Matt's glory as a high school football star. Life couldn't be sweeter, right? Wrong!

Trouble begins when Joan's mother, Emily, accidentally burns down her own house and moves in with the Hapgoods. Matt is terrified of his foul-tempered grandmother, who refers to him as 'Joan's bastard.' Emily's odd behavior reaches a fever pitch when she insists that the bedroom of her long-dead (and much-favored) elder daughter, Cynthia, be recreated, prom dress, dolls, and all. The household's normal warmth vanishes, 'the sense of welcome and comfort was gone.' Matt complains of strange, perverted dreams in which the staggeringly beautiful Cynthia visits him, leaving behind the pungent scent of her Nightshade perfume. Joan also feels the presence of her dead sister, and has painful flashbacks to a childhood best left forgotten. A murder and three disappearances befall the small town, Matt spirals into depression, and Joan loses her mind. Throw in child abuse, torture, and a wickedly irritable ghost, and we have one whopper of a nightmare. Nightshade contains gobs of gore, melodramatic (and occasionally bumbling) prose, and a deviant, twisted ending--John Saul's famous recipe for family disaster and reader delight. --Naomi Gesinger

View descriptions at Amazon.com

Recommended

Full Dark, No Stars
by Stephen King

A new collection of four never-before-published stories from Stephen King.

Comes the Blind Fury
by John Saul

Amanda: A century ago, a gentle blind girl walked the cliffs of Paradise Point. Then the children came - taunting, teasing - until she lost her...

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire...
by Seth Grahame-Smith

Indiana, 1818. Moonlight falls through the dense woods that surround a one-room cabin, where a nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln kneels at his suffering...

Apt Pupil
by Stephen King

Todd Bowden is an apt pupil. Good grades, good family, a paper route. But he is about to meet a different kind of teacher: Mr. Dussander. Todd knows...

Under The Dome
by Stephen King

In Stephen King's mesmerizing new novel, a Maine town is subject to the imposition of an impenetrable dome that isolates its citizens from the world.

Cell
by Stephen King

On October 1st, God is in His heaven, the stock market stands at 10,140, most of the planes are on time, and Clayton Riddell, an artist from Maine, is...

In the Dark of the Night
by John Saul

The Brewster family's idyllic summer vacation at Phantom Lake turns to horror when their teenage son and his friends stumble upon a mysterious secret...

Midnight
by Dean Koontz

In picturesque Moonlight Cove, California, inexplicable deaths occur and spine-tingling terror descends to this 'edge of paradise.' Growing numbers of...

Bag Of Bones
by Stephen King

On a very hot day in August of 1994, my wife told me she was going down to the Derry Rite Aid to pick up a refill on her sinus medicine...

Reviews