I like horror.  Horror books, horror movies, horror sounds, Marilyn Manson, Barry Manilow and the Carpenters.  I like splatter punk, psychological horror, ghosts, monsters, vampires, and werewolves, OH MY!  (Sorry, I couldn’t resist; rainy days and Mondays always bring me down.)  I like fast paced, balls to the wall, four on the floor action, and I also like deliberate pacing, stories that slowly unfold to reveal their wonders and mysteries and secrets.  Robert Dunbar’s The Pines has action, it has moments of quiet horror, it has creepy woods on a dark night, and equally scary swamps in the broad daylight; it has crazed, inbred rednecks, kids with psychic links to murderous monsters, and feral dogs roaming the countryside for their next meal.  It has all the right ingredients, but none of them taste good together.
 
The Pines is all over the place.  Dunbar ties it all up in a decent enough bow, leaving room for a sequel.  Dear Mr. Dunbar, please don’t.  Just, uh…just move on.
 
A series of murders has struck the Pine Barrens.  It’s blamed on the wild dogs, but the Pineys, the backwoods people with no teeth and a penchant for moonshine and incest, know it’s something besides them there dogs.  It’s the Jersey Devil, or a werewolf, or some strange combination thereof.  Athena (not a Piney, but the widow of one), struggles to raise her disturbed son, Matthew, amid the prejudice from the normal citizens as well as the inbred ones.  She is from the big city, and only stays because she says she feels safe in the Barrens, for whatever reason because I honestly don’t know where she got that particular idea.  Living a stones throw from the loony Pineys would have sent me packing long ago, but I digress.  As one can guess, little Matthew can see into the mind of the monster-on-the-prowl, see through it’s eyes, but can’t articulate what’s going on due to his diminished mental capabilities.
 
The Pines is filled with a lot of things, most of which felt unnecessary.  Not even half way through, I was wishing to finish to get it out of the way.  Dunbar is a decent writer, and he gives us some decent moments throughout the story, but it gets bogged down in its own swampy morass.  The copy of the book I read proclaimed UNCUT VERSION!  Maybe the cuts were made for a reason.
 
My score:  2 out of 5