Description:

Amazon.com Review

There's no such thing as a happy family in John Saul's dark imagination. He made this chillingly clear in and , 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

From Library Journal

The life of high school student Matt Hapgood turns into the stuff of nightmares when his grandmother moves in with his family. She brings with her the terrifying spirit of her dead daughter, Cynthia, the beautiful, beloved, older sister of Matt's mother, Joan, who had been the tormented, abused younger child. All the suffering of those early years is brought into Matt's household from the moment his stepfather is shot to death while they are hunting together. Soon Matt, his mother, and his grandmother have horrifying visions of Cynthia in all her malevolent beauty, and they watch helplessly as she instigates brutal killings. But is it really Cynthia? There are hints that perhaps Joan has taken on her sister's persona, and the answer is left until the last page. It is unfortunate that Saul's leaden prose has turned a provocative theme into a boring novel. This book has little to offer, but the author is popular (e.g., Second Child), and librarians should expect large reader demand.
---Patricia Altner, Information Seekers, Bowie, MD
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.