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3.61 AVERAGE
3.61 AVERAGE
dark
tense
dark
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I thought this story was just okay until I got about a third of the way in - then the really dark stuff started to happen. Later in the book, when I thought things couldn't get any worse, they did! Although the family / community drama at the heart of the story was good, those messed up moments in the cave stole the show. Unfortunately, despite some good scenes, the last few chapters of the book felt like a long, drawn out epilogue. That being said, I was satisfied by the hopelessness of the ending.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcoholism, Animal death, Child abuse, Child death, Confinement, Death, Mental illness, Panic attacks/disorders, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Torture, Forced institutionalization, Blood, Kidnapping, Grief, Murder, Alcohol, Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, Animal cruelty, Bullying, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Incest, Infidelity, Pedophilia, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Suicide attempt, Death of parent
Suffer the Children is a spooky and painfully relatable tale. Scarier than the missing children, the book tackles subjects like rape, abuse, and trauma and how it can destroy relationships and even people.
Spoiler
Suffer the children ends on a hauntingly dissatisfying note, which further illustrates the theme that suffering never stops or even makes sense. We never recover, we just get better at hiding the pain.
While I really enjoyed this book. The atmosphere was very creepy. It had the perfect haunted house/eerie/ melancholy vibes for me. The characters read like real people (I think specifically of Jaws, Benchley, and Stephen King's early works)
But I was also very confused for most of the book, I thought it would all be resolved as things were revealed, part of the mystery, but it really didn't.
I must have missed something somewhere, but even going back and rereading the beginning didn't clarify things up... I eventually looked up what was going on but I had come to some very twisted (and as it turns out mostly wrong conclusions) that the father was molesting both of his daughters, that this had also happened to other Conger girls in the past I was unsure if the macabre ending was the result of a ghost/possesion/Haunting or something stemming from the trauma of the molestation. I never did figure out if we were supposed to believe in ghosts or insanity (a-la head full of ghosts, Trembley), the tea party seance was great to read about but never did figure out what it was really..
Update : After reading other Saul books, he obviously has a bit of a template he follows, and the very vague, meandering, open-ended method of storytelling he uses is almost hyper stylized to him. While it's not bad reading, it is not exactly good storytelling either.
But I was also very confused for most of the book, I thought it would all be resolved as things were revealed, part of the mystery, but it really didn't.
I must have missed something somewhere, but even going back and rereading the beginning didn't clarify things up... I eventually looked up what was going on but I had come to some very twisted (and as it turns out mostly wrong conclusions) that the father was molesting both of his daughters, that this had also happened to other Conger girls in the past I was unsure if the macabre ending was the result of a ghost/possesion/Haunting or something stemming from the trauma of the molestation. I never did figure out if we were supposed to believe in ghosts or insanity (a-la head full of ghosts, Trembley), the tea party seance was great to read about but never did figure out what it was really..
Update : After reading other Saul books, he obviously has a bit of a template he follows, and the very vague, meandering, open-ended method of storytelling he uses is almost hyper stylized to him. While it's not bad reading, it is not exactly good storytelling either.
dark
medium-paced
The setting made for a perfect eerie feeling. The small town vibe is something I’m familiar with personally, the location of the cave is thrilling to me to say the least. It makes me want to go explore to find that cave and go search inside.
The characters, I have a love-hate with. But I’m fairly certain that’s the point. It seems like the author wants you to have hatred and disgust while thinking of some of the characters, while also feeling sympathetic towards them at other times. It makes you question if that person even deserves those feelings from you. I’m talking about mainly Jack and Elizabeth. sometimes Jack’s secretary and sometimes Rose. The author definitely is capable of showing you multiple sides to people. The good and the ugly.
All the abuse going on in this book required me to read a not- so-horror book afterwards to lighten my mood. I’m thankful the book wasn’t overly heavy on that, there’s “just enough”. But when it’s there it makes me uncomfortable in my skin. I blame my empathy. But I still always go back for more.
The plot in the book I loved. I was interested the entire time. The main plot with the family curse at first had me scoffing, until you notice the subtle places he places information relevant to that. ( I.e. how Elizabeth’s footing would change in the woods when she was Elizabeth vs Beth. Or her voice .) he didn’t flat out say “and now Beth said this”. It was subtle and seemed more realistic instead if he said something more dramatic like “and then she started to glow and out of the glow she transformed to Beth”. I like how he did it and it made the whole family curse more real and interesting to me.
They mix was good with the side stories not being too much for me to forget the main plot as well. It has enough information for me to make me feel like I was a part of it all.
The only reason I didn’t give this book 5 stars is I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to have more from Sarah. Even if it was the ending chapters when she was more lucid. I’d love to have been in her thoughts a bit more. This poor girl I loved the entire time. But over all, definitely a book I loved. Possibly could reread in the future.
The characters, I have a love-hate with. But I’m fairly certain that’s the point. It seems like the author wants you to have hatred and disgust while thinking of some of the characters, while also feeling sympathetic towards them at other times. It makes you question if that person even deserves those feelings from you. I’m talking about mainly Jack and Elizabeth. sometimes Jack’s secretary and sometimes Rose. The author definitely is capable of showing you multiple sides to people. The good and the ugly.
All the abuse going on in this book required me to read a not- so-horror book afterwards to lighten my mood. I’m thankful the book wasn’t overly heavy on that, there’s “just enough”. But when it’s there it makes me uncomfortable in my skin. I blame my empathy. But I still always go back for more.
The plot in the book I loved. I was interested the entire time. The main plot with the family curse at first had me scoffing, until you notice the subtle places he places information relevant to that. ( I.e. how Elizabeth’s footing would change in the woods when she was Elizabeth vs Beth. Or her voice .) he didn’t flat out say “and now Beth said this”. It was subtle and seemed more realistic instead if he said something more dramatic like “and then she started to glow and out of the glow she transformed to Beth”. I like how he did it and it made the whole family curse more real and interesting to me.
They mix was good with the side stories not being too much for me to forget the main plot as well. It has enough information for me to make me feel like I was a part of it all.
The only reason I didn’t give this book 5 stars is I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to have more from Sarah. Even if it was the ending chapters when she was more lucid. I’d love to have been in her thoughts a bit more. This poor girl I loved the entire time. But over all, definitely a book I loved. Possibly could reread in the future.
Trigger warnings abound in this book, so if cruelty towards animals and/or children (it's not super explicit, but definitely present) flips the switch for you, avoid this one.
For decades now, despite my interest in horror fiction, I always thought John Saul was kind of a joke. And the thing is, I've no idea where this idea came from. I certainly hadn't read anything of his that would put that notion in my head. All I can think is that through the years of browsing the Horror section in various used bookstores, there were always, I mean like there was some unwritten arcane rule that things had to be this way, a litany of John Saul paperbacks along the shelves. And every year, like clockwork, a new title appeared. Somewhere along the line, my brain must have looked at that level of output and been like, "This dude's the Danielle Steel of horror fiction."
Now, I mean no disrespect to Danielle Steel or her legions of readers, but at a certain point you have to assume that anybody who churns out novels like that either has a legion of ghost writers working for them, or that the content cannot possibly be any good. So ever since I got seriously interested in Horror in the very early 90s, I had (with, I reiterate, zero evidence to back this up) pegged John Saul as a guy who couldn't possibly be worth reading. So I read King, I read Koontz, and every time I seemed about ready to pick up something by Saul and give him the benefit of the doubt, my hand would gravitate to some other author, some other title, and I'd go home with that instead.
Then a massive collection of Saul's early works appeared in the bookstore where I work, and I decided there really was no good reason for me to deliberately keep avoiding him when I give so much space to absolute trash on my shelves already. Ergo, I bought all nineteen of them, and decided the best place to start is usually the beginning, and that's Suffer the Children, so here we are.
I went in with zero expectations, and finished with an attitude of "Holy shit, what the hell has been wrong with me just avoiding this guy's stuff for the last thirty years?". I won't know until I explore further, but presuming this book isn't a one-off and the rest of his literary output couldn't live up to his freshman outing, I think we've got ourselves a winner, folks. Suffer the Children is a dark, nasty little piece of work involving murder, possession, cruelty, sexual assault, and other bits and bobs of depravity. Saul isn't as folksy and long-winded as King, as fast-paced and breakneck as Laymon, or as direct and just-the-facts-ma'am as Ketchum. The story feels like it goes just as long as it needs to go, and the last thirty or so pages are very much a kick in the balls to anyone expecting some kind of positive resolution to the story. There is much suffering of children, and the book ends with the promise that there will be more to come.
I don't know, maybe five stars is too high for this and it's really more of a "four stars and change" manuscript, but given the way I treated his books over the years, I'm dropping a five on this one to try and atone for that mistake. This is one hell of a first novel, and I'm definitely intrigued to see what Saul has to offer with his sophomore effort, Punish the Sinners.
For decades now, despite my interest in horror fiction, I always thought John Saul was kind of a joke. And the thing is, I've no idea where this idea came from. I certainly hadn't read anything of his that would put that notion in my head. All I can think is that through the years of browsing the Horror section in various used bookstores, there were always, I mean like there was some unwritten arcane rule that things had to be this way, a litany of John Saul paperbacks along the shelves. And every year, like clockwork, a new title appeared. Somewhere along the line, my brain must have looked at that level of output and been like, "This dude's the Danielle Steel of horror fiction."
Now, I mean no disrespect to Danielle Steel or her legions of readers, but at a certain point you have to assume that anybody who churns out novels like that either has a legion of ghost writers working for them, or that the content cannot possibly be any good. So ever since I got seriously interested in Horror in the very early 90s, I had (with, I reiterate, zero evidence to back this up) pegged John Saul as a guy who couldn't possibly be worth reading. So I read King, I read Koontz, and every time I seemed about ready to pick up something by Saul and give him the benefit of the doubt, my hand would gravitate to some other author, some other title, and I'd go home with that instead.
Then a massive collection of Saul's early works appeared in the bookstore where I work, and I decided there really was no good reason for me to deliberately keep avoiding him when I give so much space to absolute trash on my shelves already. Ergo, I bought all nineteen of them, and decided the best place to start is usually the beginning, and that's Suffer the Children, so here we are.
I went in with zero expectations, and finished with an attitude of "Holy shit, what the hell has been wrong with me just avoiding this guy's stuff for the last thirty years?". I won't know until I explore further, but presuming this book isn't a one-off and the rest of his literary output couldn't live up to his freshman outing, I think we've got ourselves a winner, folks. Suffer the Children is a dark, nasty little piece of work involving murder, possession, cruelty, sexual assault, and other bits and bobs of depravity. Saul isn't as folksy and long-winded as King, as fast-paced and breakneck as Laymon, or as direct and just-the-facts-ma'am as Ketchum. The story feels like it goes just as long as it needs to go, and the last thirty or so pages are very much a kick in the balls to anyone expecting some kind of positive resolution to the story. There is much suffering of children, and the book ends with the promise that there will be more to come.
I don't know, maybe five stars is too high for this and it's really more of a "four stars and change" manuscript, but given the way I treated his books over the years, I'm dropping a five on this one to try and atone for that mistake. This is one hell of a first novel, and I'm definitely intrigued to see what Saul has to offer with his sophomore effort, Punish the Sinners.
This is personally one of my favorite books. I read it when I was in high school. It kept me interested and reading to find out what was going to happen with the little girls. I am terrible with reviews but this book is one that I have read several times.
This is one of my absolute favorite books!! I've read it at least a dozen times....Oh that reminds me....It's been a year or two since I've read it, I'll have to find my copy again and refresh my mind to great storytelling! Ha Ha