"Iverson's Pits" in the collection Prayers to Broken Stones was strong, and had an authentic energy behind it, like a twice-told conte cruel inspired by Bierce. This was not a book inspired by travel, as were books by Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Paul Theroux. Song of Kali I recall as a singularly unpleasant reading experience whose moral seems to be" Never Visit the Third World. It makes me think maybe the horror genre thought they could turn him into the next Big Thing, a new suburb of King-land. Simmons was promoted as the next big thing in the 80s by Harlan Ellison and Twilight Zone Magazine. This simply did nothing for me, sounding more like a droning history lecture in a stuffy classroom. The bookish kid, Duane, tries to learn about the Borgia Bell, supposedly hidden inside the public school's bell tower, and which may have supernatural properties, the well from which the horror springs. Scenes of characters investigating historical documents and ancient tomes to determine the true nature of their adversary is an aspect of horror fiction near and dear to my heart, but here it seems by-the-numbers. There were lamprey-like creatures burrowing beneath cornfields, chasing folks, in some cinematic sequences, cool, okay, but these scenes weren't anything fresh, almost rehashes of Tremors. The impossible mouth opened wide and Mike saw more teeth - rows and rows of teeth, endless lines of white that seemed to recede down the thing's gullet. Menace, madness, or evil, only threads of mildly interesting bits that dissolve into thin air.įather C's smile continued to broaden, pulling back to show his back teeth, broadening further until it seemed the man's face would snap in half as if on a hinge. Several hundred pages elapse before we get any kind of real palpable Written by someone who was simply regurgitating It, maybe "The Body," maybe Dandelion Wine with a smidge of The Outsiders thrown in. Is based on the author's own childhood, nothing feels real or lived. In fact I didn't find it all that, uh, Kingian: Summer of Night feels like it was plotted and written on References that can clutter King's style, and actually I started to miss that as Simmons tries for universality and ends up with cliche, goes after Sure, Simmons writes without all the junky pop-culture Identity while laboring under the shadow of the largest horror of all, Stephen King's 1986 thousand-plus-page It. However the book simply doesn't have its own Summer of Night is obviously Simmons attempting to set up camp in some familiar horror territory.
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