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sandygx260's review against another edition
3.0
Odd how I stumbled across two vampires novels to read, one written in 2010 and one in 2011.
I had trouble reviewing Draculas, and now I have trouble reviewing Enter Night. Draculas is written by four different authors, but they pulled it off. Enter Night is written by one author who at times seems to be three different authors—one who crafts beautiful, heart wrenching scenes, another who writes history with an attentive eye, and a third who can’t write his way out of a wet paper bag with a rip in it.
When I first starting reading Enter Night, I doubted if I would finish the novel. We’re introduced to a down-on-his luck young character named Jordan who makes a complete hash out of his life, decides to return home on the cheap bus, and…whoops, bad decision, dude. Such a weird introduction.
There’s an abrupt change of scenery to Christina Parr, her daughter Morgan, and her gay brother-in-law Jeremy Parr, who are returning to live with Christina’s straight-from-hell-casting mother–in-law, the rich, odious, and completely cliché Adeline Parr.
Let the bumpy ride begin—again.
Like I said, there are scenes which are lovely, a true treat to read. There are scenes which will make the reader go “are you fucking kidding me?” There’s a paragraph where character’s names are mixed up, which is truly unfortunate.
Ultimately I blame the editor here, whom should have been harsher while editing certain scenes and dialog. Here’s the weird part— I totally believe the younger characters, fifteen year-old Morgan Parr, and Finnegan Miller, who is a twelve year-old loner. His only friend is his dog Sadie, and, ultimately, Morgan. Rowe’s descriptions of them are sensitive and utterly believable. The adult characters seem far more cliché, especially Adeline “the Harpy” Parr. Jeremy Parr and Christina Parr are hasty sketches of characters. The police are testosterone-laden clichés.
In fact, the most believable character in the novel is Sadie, the brave, loyal Labrador. Yep, Finn’s heroic dog steals the show. I’m crying just thinking about Sadie.
Characters die, the story races along, heroes die, vampires die, then there’s “The End”. I’m thinking, “wait, I still have pages to go.”
For some reason, Rowe ends the novel with police reports, then, and I kid you not, a looooong letter from a dying Jesuit, written in 1650 while on his deathbed. This novella-length letter supplies the history behind what horrors have happened in the town.
What? Really?
Why didn’t Rowe sprinkle this in between the 1972-based chapters? The effort would have made for a much stronger novel, giving the pull of the historical back and forth. Slapping it on the novel’s end really made no sense. The historical account is well-written, but too much of an anchor to the story.
I am really tempted to give this a two star rating, but those lovely, well-written scenes which made me cry urge me to bump it up to a three. I hope that the version of Michael Rowe who crafted those scenes will write a complete novel.
I had trouble reviewing Draculas, and now I have trouble reviewing Enter Night. Draculas is written by four different authors, but they pulled it off. Enter Night is written by one author who at times seems to be three different authors—one who crafts beautiful, heart wrenching scenes, another who writes history with an attentive eye, and a third who can’t write his way out of a wet paper bag with a rip in it.
When I first starting reading Enter Night, I doubted if I would finish the novel. We’re introduced to a down-on-his luck young character named Jordan who makes a complete hash out of his life, decides to return home on the cheap bus, and…whoops, bad decision, dude. Such a weird introduction.
There’s an abrupt change of scenery to Christina Parr, her daughter Morgan, and her gay brother-in-law Jeremy Parr, who are returning to live with Christina’s straight-from-hell-casting mother–in-law, the rich, odious, and completely cliché Adeline Parr.
Let the bumpy ride begin—again.
Like I said, there are scenes which are lovely, a true treat to read. There are scenes which will make the reader go “are you fucking kidding me?” There’s a paragraph where character’s names are mixed up, which is truly unfortunate.
Ultimately I blame the editor here, whom should have been harsher while editing certain scenes and dialog. Here’s the weird part— I totally believe the younger characters, fifteen year-old Morgan Parr, and Finnegan Miller, who is a twelve year-old loner. His only friend is his dog Sadie, and, ultimately, Morgan. Rowe’s descriptions of them are sensitive and utterly believable. The adult characters seem far more cliché, especially Adeline “the Harpy” Parr. Jeremy Parr and Christina Parr are hasty sketches of characters. The police are testosterone-laden clichés.
In fact, the most believable character in the novel is Sadie, the brave, loyal Labrador. Yep, Finn’s heroic dog steals the show. I’m crying just thinking about Sadie.
Characters die, the story races along, heroes die, vampires die, then there’s “The End”. I’m thinking, “wait, I still have pages to go.”
For some reason, Rowe ends the novel with police reports, then, and I kid you not, a looooong letter from a dying Jesuit, written in 1650 while on his deathbed. This novella-length letter supplies the history behind what horrors have happened in the town.
What? Really?
Why didn’t Rowe sprinkle this in between the 1972-based chapters? The effort would have made for a much stronger novel, giving the pull of the historical back and forth. Slapping it on the novel’s end really made no sense. The historical account is well-written, but too much of an anchor to the story.
I am really tempted to give this a two star rating, but those lovely, well-written scenes which made me cry urge me to bump it up to a three. I hope that the version of Michael Rowe who crafted those scenes will write a complete novel.
gonzalez711's review against another edition
1.0
I thought it was extremely slow! It was not as suspenseful as others made it out to be. I was a bit bored to be honest. I will read from this author again but this one was not good. Im hoping Rowe's other books are better.
bunnieslikediamonds's review against another edition
2.0
I like horror, I really do. I'm not a literary snob. I don't frown upon vampires or zombies or ghouls. That said, there is a lot of awful stuff being published in the genre, and I don't get it. Genre fiction can be well-written and original, it doesn't have to be clichéd and formulaic, so why is it? Finding quality horror - or supernaturalistic fiction, or speculative fiction or whatever you want to call it - is hard. When I do find it, I'm excessively excited and grateful and keep chirping about it for anyone who'll listen. "See, it can be done! And this is how!"
I had high hopes for Enter, Night, having read some glowing reviews. It had so much potential: the 70's small town setting in rural Ontario, a couple of interesting characters and a nice, creepy atmosphere, but it all added up to nothing. Rowe tries hard to give his characters a back story and some depth, but then lets them dissolve into shrill, overblown stereotypes (the sarcastic gay man, the noble Native American, the super-evil matriarch, the lovable nerdy kid and his faithful labrador). The metaphors are heavy-handed and the dialogue clunky. Much is made of the intolerant small-town mentality and the abuse suffered by the main players, but there is no catharsis or development. No horror, either - just a campy bloodfest that made me chuckle. The vampires are comic book vamps who obediently crumble when faced with religious artefacts and wooden stakes, and go poof when touched by daylight.
Perhaps it would work better as a movie. Or a horror musical, where the kitschiness could be safely unleashed.
I had high hopes for Enter, Night, having read some glowing reviews. It had so much potential: the 70's small town setting in rural Ontario, a couple of interesting characters and a nice, creepy atmosphere, but it all added up to nothing. Rowe tries hard to give his characters a back story and some depth, but then lets them dissolve into shrill, overblown stereotypes (the sarcastic gay man, the noble Native American, the super-evil matriarch, the lovable nerdy kid and his faithful labrador). The metaphors are heavy-handed and the dialogue clunky. Much is made of the intolerant small-town mentality and the abuse suffered by the main players, but there is no catharsis or development. No horror, either - just a campy bloodfest that made me chuckle. The vampires are comic book vamps who obediently crumble when faced with religious artefacts and wooden stakes, and go poof when touched by daylight.
Perhaps it would work better as a movie. Or a horror musical, where the kitschiness could be safely unleashed.
sandraandthecity's review against another edition
5.0
An amazing book. The setting, the story and the writing. If you want to read an intelligent vampire book, and you want to be actually scared...read this book
mdpenguin's review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
This was almost really good, but it lost me at the end. The basic idea of how the end worked was good, but the execution just didn't work for me. It felt kind of sloppy and unguided, really. Honestly, all the characters started to feel kind of vacuous and dragged along by the whims of the author by the end. and I seriously think we could have done without the fifteen year old girl having sex with the twelve year old boy, which felt more put in there to get a reaction rather than to serve the plot or characters in any way. I make it sound worse than it was, though, because even with that I'd have given it four stars. It lost the second star with the final bit, which was a novella with the origin story of the local vampire and the destruction of the Jesuit mission. The story wasn't bad, but it was a total shift of perspective and storytelling technique that didn't fit that well with the rest of the book. And, honestly, I just didn't care for or about the perspective of the Jesuit priest from which it was told.
sireno8's review against another edition
4.0
Definition of the term "page turner". Story moves at a great pace. Really gets the gothic tone right. Dodged expected tropes. Sometimes the given circumstances are repeated more than needed and I would have liked to have a few more of the loose ends tied up. That being said, a real thriller.
verkisto's review against another edition
3.0
A few months back, I read an article highlighting ten of the best horror novels "You've Never Read". Aside from being pretty proud of myself for having read five of them, I was happy to add five more books to my to-read list, so when Enter, Night popped up in my random reads generator, I was eager to get started on it.
Enter, Night is a vampire novel that plays around with your expectations a bit, since when it begins, the "vampire" we meet is clearly just a regular guy wishing he were a vampire. He's still murderous, and he still drinks blood, but he lacks the fangs, and there's a strong vibe suggesting that he's just crazy. From there, the story, set in 1971, shifts to the small town of Parr's Landing, an old mining town that's run dry, leaving most people struggling for work. There's a definite parallel between a supernatural creature who sucks people dry and a small, do-nothing town that sucks its inhabitants dry, and that's just the first symbolic connection we find in the novel.
Our main characters are: Adeline Parr, the rich, privileged, self-entitled surviving matriarch of the family who ran the mining company; her recently-widowed daughter-in-law, Christine, who left Parr's Landing sixteen years ago when she became pregnant out of wedlock with Adeline's son; Christine's daughter Moran; and Adeline's other son, Jeremy, a gay man who fled Parr's Landing at seventeen after his mother sent him to a gay reformation camp that consisted of physical and psychological torture. After Christine loses her husband in a car accident, and the three find themselves out of work, with no insurance or prospects, they return home to Adeline, which is probably the worst decision of their lives.
Adeline is one of the most despicable characters ever created for fiction. She's hateful, entitled, arrogant, and condescending, and once her family returns home, she takes it as an opportunity to belittle and control them. Christine is nothing more than a slut in her eyes, and she's passed that feeling along to everyone else in town. She despises her gay son, going so far as to tell Jeremy that she wished he had died instead of her other son, and what she sees as a new start in Morgan falls apart as soon as she walks home from school with another boy. She's horrible and unlikable, and she's not even the main antagonist in the story.
The other boy Morgan befriends is Finn, who is younger than she by four years, and who loves his black lab more than anything in the world. Morgan is innocence personified, though that all changes as soon as strange things start happening around the town. It ties back to the beginning of the book, with the "vampire" who is on a killing spree, but Finn is the heart of the story, not in the sense that he's the most important character, but that he's the only one who knows how to love. The relationship between him and his dog is expertly crafted, and anyone who's had a pet will connect with them both.
I'm spending a lot of time talking about the characters because this is where Rowe's talents really shine. All of them feel realized, and he easily gets you to feel how he wants you to feel about all of them. We get glimpses into other characters in town, including a cop who was Jeremy's first love, and a Native American who knows a lot about the history of Parr's Landing, who are less realized, but no less effective to the story, but the story is really about that small circle of characters and their strange, dysfunctional relationships.
What I found less impressive about the book was its structure and pacing. The book opens with a lengthy section involving the "vampire" and a small part of his killing spree, and then abandons it to introduce the main characters. The next long section of the novel is about introducing our characters, along with the town itself, peppered with small references to what's going on beneath the town. The last hundred pages are when all hell breaks loose, and it wraps up fairly quickly, and without a clear resolution. With so much time spent on the vampires and the town, I expected there to be some firm ending telling us what happened, but the story stops just as all that gets started. I don't mind ambiguous endings, but I'd like my stories to at least bring the main conflict to a close, and Enter, Night doesn't do that.
Following the end of the story is a chapter telling us about how the vampirism began. I give Rowe credit for tying in the vampires with the legends of the Wendigo; it might not be the first time an author has connected those two legends, but it's the first I can recall reading. The thing is, this chapter takes us back over 300 years ago, and doesn't involve any of the people we've just connected with, making the whole thing anticlimactic, since we no longer have any connection with the story being told. To make things worse, the publisher chose to stylize that chapter with page backgrounds to make them look like wrinkled manuscript pages, which was just distracting. Plus, the central decision of the story -- that Christine and her family return to live with Adeline -- didn't ring true with me. I know they were desperate, but as horrible as Adeline was, why on earth would they choose living with her over anything else?
The book reads more like a literary character examination than an actual horror novel, and I suspect that this book would work more for literary readers than for horror readers. What Rowe does with his vampires doesn't make them stand out in a large field of vampire novels, so anyone familiar with most of them won't find anything new here. Readers who only know the broad strokes of vampirism might be more impressed with how he handles the creatures, though.
There are a lot of things to like about this book, namely in the character development, but it's still not a perfect book for me. I may have raised my expectations too much, based on how much I had heard about this book, and I would have liked it a lot more if the structure had been better, but I would only recommend this book with reservations, especially to horror readers. He does create atmosphere and tension well, but it seems like it stops just as it starts to get interesting.
Unfortunate Musical Connection: "Enter Sandman" by Metallica (Seriously. I got it stuck in my head every time I picked up this book.)
Enter, Night is a vampire novel that plays around with your expectations a bit, since when it begins, the "vampire" we meet is clearly just a regular guy wishing he were a vampire. He's still murderous, and he still drinks blood, but he lacks the fangs, and there's a strong vibe suggesting that he's just crazy. From there, the story, set in 1971, shifts to the small town of Parr's Landing, an old mining town that's run dry, leaving most people struggling for work. There's a definite parallel between a supernatural creature who sucks people dry and a small, do-nothing town that sucks its inhabitants dry, and that's just the first symbolic connection we find in the novel.
Our main characters are: Adeline Parr, the rich, privileged, self-entitled surviving matriarch of the family who ran the mining company; her recently-widowed daughter-in-law, Christine, who left Parr's Landing sixteen years ago when she became pregnant out of wedlock with Adeline's son; Christine's daughter Moran; and Adeline's other son, Jeremy, a gay man who fled Parr's Landing at seventeen after his mother sent him to a gay reformation camp that consisted of physical and psychological torture. After Christine loses her husband in a car accident, and the three find themselves out of work, with no insurance or prospects, they return home to Adeline, which is probably the worst decision of their lives.
Adeline is one of the most despicable characters ever created for fiction. She's hateful, entitled, arrogant, and condescending, and once her family returns home, she takes it as an opportunity to belittle and control them. Christine is nothing more than a slut in her eyes, and she's passed that feeling along to everyone else in town. She despises her gay son, going so far as to tell Jeremy that she wished he had died instead of her other son, and what she sees as a new start in Morgan falls apart as soon as she walks home from school with another boy. She's horrible and unlikable, and she's not even the main antagonist in the story.
The other boy Morgan befriends is Finn, who is younger than she by four years, and who loves his black lab more than anything in the world. Morgan is innocence personified, though that all changes as soon as strange things start happening around the town. It ties back to the beginning of the book, with the "vampire" who is on a killing spree, but Finn is the heart of the story, not in the sense that he's the most important character, but that he's the only one who knows how to love. The relationship between him and his dog is expertly crafted, and anyone who's had a pet will connect with them both.
I'm spending a lot of time talking about the characters because this is where Rowe's talents really shine. All of them feel realized, and he easily gets you to feel how he wants you to feel about all of them. We get glimpses into other characters in town, including a cop who was Jeremy's first love, and a Native American who knows a lot about the history of Parr's Landing, who are less realized, but no less effective to the story, but the story is really about that small circle of characters and their strange, dysfunctional relationships.
What I found less impressive about the book was its structure and pacing. The book opens with a lengthy section involving the "vampire" and a small part of his killing spree, and then abandons it to introduce the main characters. The next long section of the novel is about introducing our characters, along with the town itself, peppered with small references to what's going on beneath the town. The last hundred pages are when all hell breaks loose, and it wraps up fairly quickly, and without a clear resolution. With so much time spent on the vampires and the town, I expected there to be some firm ending telling us what happened, but the story stops just as all that gets started. I don't mind ambiguous endings, but I'd like my stories to at least bring the main conflict to a close, and Enter, Night doesn't do that.
Following the end of the story is a chapter telling us about how the vampirism began. I give Rowe credit for tying in the vampires with the legends of the Wendigo; it might not be the first time an author has connected those two legends, but it's the first I can recall reading. The thing is, this chapter takes us back over 300 years ago, and doesn't involve any of the people we've just connected with, making the whole thing anticlimactic, since we no longer have any connection with the story being told. To make things worse, the publisher chose to stylize that chapter with page backgrounds to make them look like wrinkled manuscript pages, which was just distracting. Plus, the central decision of the story -- that Christine and her family return to live with Adeline -- didn't ring true with me. I know they were desperate, but as horrible as Adeline was, why on earth would they choose living with her over anything else?
The book reads more like a literary character examination than an actual horror novel, and I suspect that this book would work more for literary readers than for horror readers. What Rowe does with his vampires doesn't make them stand out in a large field of vampire novels, so anyone familiar with most of them won't find anything new here. Readers who only know the broad strokes of vampirism might be more impressed with how he handles the creatures, though.
There are a lot of things to like about this book, namely in the character development, but it's still not a perfect book for me. I may have raised my expectations too much, based on how much I had heard about this book, and I would have liked it a lot more if the structure had been better, but I would only recommend this book with reservations, especially to horror readers. He does create atmosphere and tension well, but it seems like it stops just as it starts to get interesting.
Unfortunate Musical Connection: "Enter Sandman" by Metallica (Seriously. I got it stuck in my head every time I picked up this book.)
themadmaiden's review against another edition
3.0
2.5-3
I'm conflicted about this book because there were things I liked a lot and things I hated a lot. Like how it seemed random or plot convenient if the vampires turned insane and murder happy or if they were able to remain themselves but undead.
Or how the 12 year old boys crush on a 15 year old girl leads to them having sex? (it's vague how much they do) after he turns into a vampire because she feels bad for him. Why was that a vital part of the story we had to have? His unrequited crush when she was clearly not interested and just wanted a friend was borderline creepy already.
The worst part though was the backstory that was just slapped on at the end of the actual story, almost as an afterthought. I wasn't interested by that point because almost all the characters are dead and the backstory wasn't written in a way that drew my attention to it now the story was over.
I'm conflicted about this book because there were things I liked a lot and things I hated a lot. Like how it seemed random or plot convenient if the vampires turned insane and murder happy or if they were able to remain themselves but undead.
Or how the 12 year old boys crush on a 15 year old girl leads to them having sex? (it's vague how much they do) after he turns into a vampire because she feels bad for him. Why was that a vital part of the story we had to have? His unrequited crush when she was clearly not interested and just wanted a friend was borderline creepy already.
The worst part though was the backstory that was just slapped on at the end of the actual story, almost as an afterthought. I wasn't interested by that point because almost all the characters are dead and the backstory wasn't written in a way that drew my attention to it now the story was over.