“I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.”ttStephen King, Danse MacabreDON'T READ THIS REVIEW IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE BOOK -- I WILL COMPLETELY WRECK IT FOR YOU WITH SPOILERS. SORRY, I CAN'T HELP MYSELF.I read a couple of John Saul books when I was around 12. I don't remember much about them other than the undertone of forboding that completely permeated his books, and that I had to stop reading them because of it. The book started off well enough -- pulled me right in and I felt like a 1970s horror movie was unspooling in my head (I was picturing Karen Black and Christopher George as the parents). The story takes place in a small New England town, where no one locks their doors and there hasn't been a murder in almost 100 years. Hardly anyone from the outside ever moves to town. The small population looks after its own. (cue the ominous music...)Our hapless adults are the Congers - the whole damn town was practically named after them, and they are a stereotypical old name no money family. They live in a huge old house on Conger Road, Jack is the editor of the local newspaper and Rose is unhappily (for Jack, anyway) out-earning her husband selling real estate. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure who she was selling to, as hardly anyone new ever moves there. Anyway, Jack and Rose have two children. Elizabeth is 13 and the perfect daughter. She is beautiful, patient, kind, mature, obedient, and spends all of her time taking care of her younger sister Sarah. Sarah was perfectly fine until about a year before our story begins; one day she went for a walk in the woods with her father and has never been the same. He pounded the C-R-A-P out of her, almost killed her, and she hasn't spoken since. She goes to a "special" school and her father, who can't remember the incident at all, spends lots of time in the library of his big old house drinking. Needless to say, Rose and Jack don't rub along very nicely together - he can't get it up and she's pretty cranky about it. They both snipe at each other, drink lots and completely ignore their children. Rose feels inadequate when Elizabeth is around and barely speaks to her except to talk to her about Sarah, she's always worrying about Sarah and Jack - well, who cares what he thinks. Neither parent is sympathetic in the slightest. Then there's the old housekeeper Mrs. Whazhername. I'm not sure why she's in the book. She's supposed to have been around since Jack was a kid, but she doesn't do much but sleep in her chair and complain about the dirty laundry (from the girls running around the countryside in the middle of the night). She offers no insight into the family curse, their history or, well, anything. To top it all off she's a pretty crappy babysitter. By chapter three it wasn't hard to tell who the baddie was going to be, and in case any of us hadn't figured it out yet there was even more heavy-handed foreshadowing, then some genuinely creepy, gut-clenching scary writing. This skipped along ominously for a while and then the bad child finds a skeleton in a cave hidden in the bluffs, then kills her cat, dresses it in a doll's outfit and has a tea party. Shortly after that, the bad child leads a perfectly nice little friend of hers to the cave, makes her join the tea party (and put the cat's head back on after she cuts it off in a fit of rage) and leaves her in the pit in the dark. All of this is witnessed by the other sister, who conveniently can't tell on her because she can't/won't speak.Holy Christ, I thought to myself. I really read this as a kid? Where were my parents? What kind of librarian lets a kid check this book out?? Anyway, back to the fucked up stuff. The bad kid becomes even more unhinged while still fooling her idiot parents back at the house. She takes knives from the kitchen, tricks another child (this one an even younger little boy) into coming with her to the cave, and throws him down into the pit with the first kid. Another disgusting tea party follows. This time she rubs the putrid cat's corpse in the little boy's crotch after she makes him take off his clothes, she bashes at least one of them in the head with a rock and leaves them there again, in the dark. At this point I'm totally squicked out and it has become crystal clear to me why I quit reading John Saul. His books are disturbing and gross - and in a way that is completely unnecessary. I soldier on and slog through the hapless parents meeting with the equally clueless psychiatrist discussing Sarah's increasingly crazy behaviour - her clothes are covered with mud in the morning, she screams for no reason and she's acting weirder than usual. And what about those missing kids, they ask. Perhaps Sarah is behind the disappearances. (Oh for fuck's sakes, you idiots, those are her sister's clothes, not hers, why can't you see she's only upset around HER!?) Then the psychiatrist wants to know about Dad's amnesia surrounding his beating his daughter almost to death. Have you talked to anyone about this? Dad's response is, "No, why should I?" (I know the 70s were kinda loose compared to today's standards, but...)Hmmm, what next. Oh! Creepy older sister talks cute neighbour boy (who is on to how crazy she is but won't live long enough to tell anyone) into trying to find the cave with her. It's a local legend, you see, about a Conger ancestor who killed his cat then jumped off the cliff, and his daughter went missing at the same time. The legend had it that she was in a cave on the bluff but no one had been able to find it. (Heh-heh chuckles the Cryptkeeper, who knew there was a tea party already in progress there!) Of course, they find it, with mute little sister bringing up the rear. Cute neighbour boy gets thrown in the pit and batshit crazy sister has a complete family for her tea party, until she gets angry and stabs the little boy to death, dismembers him completely and bashes the others on the head with rocks. (See what I mean about unnecessary ? That scene was disturbing enough without all the blood and chopping.) I tell you, if the Mad Hatter had been at this tea party he'd have run screaming for the hills.After Sarah trudges out of the woods dragging a severed arm and covered with blood the bad parents have the good child committed, the bad child becomes an only child and everything is right with the world. Life returns to normal. The missing children are forgotten except by the old policeman who still checks the woods for them every year.Now the book skips ahead 15 years. The good committed child is being released from the hospital on a weekend pass for the first time and going to visit her sister. The old policeman stops in at the Conger house to visit Elizabeth and we are treated to a HEE-YOOOGE info dump by both of them, letting us know that over the past 15 years Jack and Rose have died (together in a boating accident, and am I the only one who finds this just a little convenient?), Sarah hasn't been home since the day she brought the arm home, the cute neighbour boy's parents moved away and the other missing kids' parents are virtual pariahs. Elizabeth is selling the woods in order to keep paying for Sarah's care. The old cop is on the verge of retirement, and wants to take one final look for the cave before the woods are razed. Well, we all know what's going to happen now -- the earth collapses on top of the cave, and the workmen and police discover the skeletons of the kids and the cat. Ooops, crazy Sarah is in trouble again, back to the hospital she goes, only after she starts screaming and her eyes roll back in her head and she goes mute. Elizabeth wanders around the house, grabs her old doll and her new kitty cat and walks out the front door. The camera (oops, sorry, I meant the author) pans us back to a diary sitting on a desk - an old diary with entries about "why is my daddy hurting me" and a cryptic quote "Suffer the children to come to me".THE END.What the heck? I finished this book and thought to myself, self, this was stupid. And disturbing, and violent and gross. I used to read a lot of Stephen King as a kid and while his stuff sometimes scared the crap out of me, it never disturbed me on the level that John Saul did. Reading this book brought to mind the quote I posted at the top of this review. John Saul was definitely a write of the "gross-out" variety. Something about Saul's theme's bother me - probably the use of children (which bothered me even when I was little more than a child myself) would be the big thing, and IIRC they figure prominently in quite a few of his books. The disturbing gross out factor is another. Or maybe I'm just getting old. The same way the Tilt-a-Whirl makes me upchuck when I used to be able to ride that thing all day, perhaps I just don't have the stomach for this type of horror anymore.3 stars - before it got gross and disturbing, it was actually pretty good.
The story revolves around the Conger family and the legend/curse that has shadowed their clan for 100 years.Jack is the editor of the local small time newspaper while his wife, Rose, is the local up-and-coming hotshot in the real estate world. They have two daughters. Elizabeth is their oldest and is a godsend. She is calm, intelligent and extremely helpful on the exterior, but there’s a simmering rage and unresolved issues not far below the surface. Sarah is their youngest. A year ago, in a drunken rage, Jack took his youngest daughter into the woods and beat her mercilessly, only just managing to restrain himself from raping and killing her in a repeat of his ancestors, so long ago.Sarah is left mute and detached from the incident. Her only form of conversation is the occasional hysterical outburst. Elizabeth is the only one able to calm her and has taken on the role of her sister’s mother. Rose has guilt about her inability to take care of Sarah but is grateful to Elizabeth for stepping in. She has other issues to deal with. Her and Jack are not having a good time of it. The Conger fortune has gone, and since the incident with Sarah, Jack has had more personal problems. Both parents are frustrated emotionally and physically, and are coming to a breaking point.Add to this volatile mix the curse by a neglected young child with vengeance that has built for over a hundred years. Jacks great-great-grandfather had done a similar thing to his daughter as Jack had done to Sarah, except he couldn’t restrain himself. 100 years ago, his ancestor, also named Jack, had taken his daughter, named Beth, into the very same woods and raped and murdered her, hiding her body in secret cave.Now Beth has become friends with Elizabeth and has decided it’s time for vengeance on Port Abello and the Congers.Saul manages to supply a vivid tale in both environment and emotion. His descriptive ability is brilliant while he portrays an everyday family and their problems exceptionally well.But his style jumped out at me. He switches the POV character without concern for the rules of writing. He may begin a sentence by discussing one characters thoughts and actions but flows effortlessly into another character’s point of view before sentence end.In one sequence where a phone call is depicted, we begin in Rose Conger’s POV and then seem to fly down the telephone lines to end up in the mother of another missing child’s POV. At the end of the conversation, we are snapped back to Rose and a very omnipotent POV. Mostly this flow allows the reader to move between characters freely but occasionally it is painfully obvious and confusing, jolting the reader from the story.The language, particularly the descriptive language between dialogue comes across as stilted in many instances. The slipping in of unnecessary long or unusual words, the lack of contractions and painstaking way every detail is relayed to the reader becomes difficult to read.However, in the end, it is a story definitely worth reading.It has been over 20 years since I first read this book. I was enthralled and scared during and after. I’m not scared anymore but the tale still has the ability to draw me in.A highly recommended book, particularly for newer horror writers.
What do You think about Suffer The Children (1989)?
There's nothing worse than a creepy kid...unless you're dealing with a possessed one.(view spoiler)[ This story revolves around two sisters and a family with a dark past. One sister, the younger, traumatized into silence. The other sister, older, being possessed by the spirit of a child ancestor.*Ghost Child's Background*The spirit plaguing the older sister is that of an ancestor. The child was raped, beaten, and left in a hidden cave over the ocean to die by her father. Surely, that'd be enough to keep any angry spirit behind, right? Her father then killed himself and the family tried to literally erase any trace of the child and the only thing that remained was a doll and a painting with the identity of the girl removed from the plaque. What's eerie about the painting is that the girl looks exactly like the older daughter now living in the house.*Back to the Review*Things seem to go well until the painting is found and brought down from the attic and hung in the family's living quarters...soon after, things you'd expect to happen in a creepy story happens.The younger sister goes for a walk with her father and they enter the area where the ghost-child was beaten and raped. Something comes over the father and he's compelled to do the evil deeds his ancestor committed...but he manages to keep from raping his daughter. Not that it matters, the beating was enough to damage his daughter to the point where she turns into a mute. The mother is a mess. She completely ignores the older child, worrying about the damaged one. The older child comes off compassionate and caring because she seems to be the only one able to communicate with her mute sister. The mother admires her older child, leaning on her to do what she can't. The thing is, the older one secretly resents all of the attention her younger sister gets, making it easy for the angry child-ghost to possess her and nobody suspects that it's her that's really the damaged of the two.Children go missing, horrible acts are committed, the children are killed in the most horrifying manner, and the guilty party goes unnoticed...eventually, the blame is placed on the younger sister, who gets sent away.I was totally sickened by the killing of the children, and I read lots of horror. It literally make me queazy, yet I couldn't stop reading.I admit that the ending pissed me off, mainly because the culprit was never discovered and the way it was left seemed so unfair. I wanted her punished. It wasn't enough to take away from the story, though. This was my first John Saul book and it did it's job. I was on the edge of my seat from start to finish, it creeped me out, horrified me, and I couldn't stop until I was done. (hide spoiler)]
—Lyla
The first book that I had picked up of John Saul was "The Right hand of Evil".It was very dark book and it impressed me.So I thought let's go back to from where Johhn Saul started it all.And thats how a picked up a copy of "Suffer the Children". After reading the book it left me totally numbed. There are just no words to decribe the emotional roller coaster ride that this book took me on.The best part of this book is the ending..it just shatters you completely and stays with you for a very long time.Recommend all to pick up this masterpiece.
—Manish Meshram
A two star rating doesn't make a book bad, especially not if it got two strong stars like this one, it just means exactly what the two-star rating on GoodReads says it means; it was OK.The story was a bit all over the place, the narrating did keep a nice and steady pace, but none of the characters were engaging enough to invest any real interest in. It's like we were presented with so many different characters with different issues that we weren't give the time to delve deeper into them and get a good grip on what made them tick. I don't know if John Saul muddled the descriptions of the characters to intentionally keep the reader in the dark about their intentions, but the end result is an interesting story that hurries through the decent plot and tries to make everything happen too fast. I think a couple of extra 100 pages, a deeper look into the Conger legend and some fleshing out of Rose and Jack's deteriorating marriage would have made this book a lot steadier and a more enjoyable read. Points awarded for getting graphic with the violence, though those bits are sadly short and too far in between.
—Nox Veneno
