Book 12: "The Keeper" by Sarah Langan
Thursday, March 31st, 2011 21:49![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwake'I'll start, and you finish', the woman said. 'Once upon a time there was a little girl and she was very unlucky She was born in a haunted place where nothing ever died.'
Susan Marley is crazy. Betrayed by her family and friends, she stopped speaking when she was a teenager and wanders mute through the streets of Bedford, Maine. And everyone in town dreams about her, although they don't talk about that, and try not to think about it either. But although Susan is the townspeople's scapegoat, things were badly wrong in Bedford long before she was born.
What I really liked abut this book is the way the author casually introduces the horrific and macabre. You are reading along and all of a sudden you read something like "Just then, the closet door opened and a monster stepped out of it." that you hardly notice at first until you are brought up short and have to go back and re-read it. I found it a very effective technique, as it mirrored the way the townspeople skated over the strange things that happened in their town. Later in the book, when the dead stalk the town menacing those townsfolk who didn't sense them coming and flee town, the horror becomes more overt, and that fits too
Reviews of Books 9 to 12 cross-posted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
50bookchallenge.
Susan Marley is crazy. Betrayed by her family and friends, she stopped speaking when she was a teenager and wanders mute through the streets of Bedford, Maine. And everyone in town dreams about her, although they don't talk about that, and try not to think about it either. But although Susan is the townspeople's scapegoat, things were badly wrong in Bedford long before she was born.
What I really liked abut this book is the way the author casually introduces the horrific and macabre. You are reading along and all of a sudden you read something like "Just then, the closet door opened and a monster stepped out of it." that you hardly notice at first until you are brought up short and have to go back and re-read it. I found it a very effective technique, as it mirrored the way the townspeople skated over the strange things that happened in their town. Later in the book, when the dead stalk the town menacing those townsfolk who didn't sense them coming and flee town, the horror becomes more overt, and that fits too
Reviews of Books 9 to 12 cross-posted to
50bookchallenge.
