The Overnight Guest

Chiller 

     Heather Gudenkauf's The Overnight Guest is not a book to read on a dark and blizzardy night, especially if the power has been knocked out.  Trust me on that.  I reread Stephen King's The Shining under those conditions.  And I knew how it ended.  Gudenkauf braids together three strands of narrative, skillfully building up to a grand finale that I believe would chill even Maine's own horror meister.

     Wylie, author of true crime books, is editing her latest one in the small town where it took place.  A blizzard slams the area with gale force wind driven snow.  Not surprisingly the power goes out.  Letting her dog out to do his business, she finds an injured little boy in her door yard.  After getting him settled in she goes back out and discovers an adult woman caught in barbed wire fencing.  But when she returns with wire cutters the woman has vanished.

     "At first, twelve-year-old Josie Doyle and her best friend, Becky Allen, ran toward the loud bangs.  It only made sense to go to the house--that's where her mother and father and Ethan were.  They would be safe.  But by the time Josie and Becky discovered their mistake it was too late."

     As they run for safety Becky falls.  Shot in the arm, Josie spends a terrifying night in a corn field, fearing that the gunman will find her and finish what he started.  In the morning, returning to her home, she discovers the shot at close range bodies of her parents.

     A little girl and her mother live in a basement, held prisoners by her sadistic father.  Sometimes he even withholds food.  The child has only experienced the outside world through glimpses out of a ground level window.  She's been the only one to tend to her pregnant mother, even cleaning up the bloody mess after her miscarriage.

     Gudenkauf is master of the cliff hanger.  I know I was unable to put the book down on that roller coaster ride toward a truly chilling conclusion.  If you're a real chiller connoisseur you won't want to miss out.

On a purrrsonal note, the Wylie strand really took me back to the ice storm of '98 when we lost power for a week:  the cold that permeated every part of the house, the darkness that enveloped everything after sunset, the gunshot like sounds of exploding tree limbs.  Eugene was out much of the time blizzard battling.  I spent a lot of time huddled under blankets with my kids aged 7, 4, and 11 months.  Only I regularly had at go out onto the ice with Adam in his backpack, hack enough ice out to fill a bucket, and melt it over a camp stove just so we could flush the toilet, the trailer park back then being on a well rather than city water.  Tobago, you've never seen anything like that.  (Jules)

That's just fine with me.  (Tobago)

A great big shout out goes out to the emergency workers who spring into action in the face of natural and man made disasters.

Tobago and Jules Hathaway 

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