LITERAL REMAINS

Timmy Graco and his friends hope to spend the summer of 1984 as they usually occupy their time: in their secret dugout in the cemetery. After a personal tragedy strikes Timmy’s family, he really wants the down time with his friends, time just being a kid. Unfortunately, someone, or something has been unearthing fresh graves in their beloved playground cemetery; and worse, young men are turning up dead, and young ladies are disappearing. The titular monster here, the Ghoul, is lurking after-hours in the cemetery, picking off couples looking for a little down time of their own, or just snatching up whoever happens to be available and ripe for the picking. It comes down to Timmy and his friends to stop the ungodly monster while they battle personal demons and dilemmas of their own.

Ghoul is by far not Brian Keene’s best novel, nor a stellar example of horror itself. It’s a passable, average, effort, offering nothing to raise the bar, only an attempt to try and meet it. It should please most horror fans, and that’s all who really need apply for this one, despite the action and quick pace. There’s plenty of gore, that’s a given, but some of the personal hardships the kids go through only make me feel that the author was going out of his way to try to shock the audience. Keene has a decent feel for the era, an adequate sense of time and place, but it seems to be set in ‘84 only because the author had a nostalgia trip, and so you could say, hey, it takes place in 1984.

Keene is much better than this, but every good (or better) author, entertainer, what-have-you, has some misses. Even the Rolling Stones had Goat’s Head Soup.

3 out of 5

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