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knifed's review against another edition
3.0
richly crafted novel with a strong sense of its mythology and intensely building horror. wordy, and i took a while to catch up with the timeline, but each awful event builds towards its great ending.
the_bookubus's review
4.0
This is full-on Southern Gothic...with voodoo! The story opens at a military wedding which ends in bloodshed. This event has changed the family forever and we follow the brother, Champ, in the aftermath.
If I had to describe this novel in one word it would be sultry. The writing evokes such an atmosphere and there were times that I had to reread passages because they were so good. I loved how the different threads of the story came together. Plus there were plenty of unsettling scenes and chilling moments.
One thing I do want to mention about this Kindle edition is that there are a lot of typos and punctuation errors. This doesn't affect my rating of the book but it did take me out of the story a few times while I was reading it which is a shame.
If I had to describe this novel in one word it would be sultry. The writing evokes such an atmosphere and there were times that I had to reread passages because they were so good. I loved how the different threads of the story came together. Plus there were plenty of unsettling scenes and chilling moments.
One thing I do want to mention about this Kindle edition is that there are a lot of typos and punctuation errors. This doesn't affect my rating of the book but it did take me out of the story a few times while I was reading it which is a shame.
rothcoe's review
3.0
This was alright. I don't really know what I was expecting when I started it - it seemed to be all over the place, kind of. Not a bad read, interesting lore about voodoo and fetishes (side note, I learned what a fetish was! It's like a relic) and some truly weird shit. I don't know if I'll read it again, but it was worth picking up.
charshorrorcorner's review
4.0
I read this e-book with my horror group at Shelfari.
This book is widely considered a classic by many hard-core horror fans. It features African voodoo, slavery, southern plantations, snakes, curses and a unique cast of characters. It is well written and the story is beautifully told. I recommend the STORY highly for any fan of old-school horror.
However, the formatting problems in this book seriously interfered with my enjoyment of the story. There were commas and periods out of place, character names being misspelled or changed throughout the story, and weird issues like the word HALL being misprinted as HAIL throughout the entire book.
I am interested in reading more works by Mr. Farris, but at this point I may seek them out in paper form at the library because I fear another ordeal of being tossed out of the story by improper punctuation, misspelled words, question marks appearing out of nowhere, etc. I have reported these issues to the publisher.
Again, I highly recommend this story-for its beautiful prose and fascinating subject matter. However, I suggest you seek it out in paper form until the publisher corrects these formatting issues.
This book is widely considered a classic by many hard-core horror fans. It features African voodoo, slavery, southern plantations, snakes, curses and a unique cast of characters. It is well written and the story is beautifully told. I recommend the STORY highly for any fan of old-school horror.
However, the formatting problems in this book seriously interfered with my enjoyment of the story. There were commas and periods out of place, character names being misspelled or changed throughout the story, and weird issues like the word HALL being misprinted as HAIL throughout the entire book.
I am interested in reading more works by Mr. Farris, but at this point I may seek them out in paper form at the library because I fear another ordeal of being tossed out of the story by improper punctuation, misspelled words, question marks appearing out of nowhere, etc. I have reported these issues to the publisher.
Again, I highly recommend this story-for its beautiful prose and fascinating subject matter. However, I suggest you seek it out in paper form until the publisher corrects these formatting issues.
coffeebean86's review
2.0
I finished reading Grady Hendrix's "Paperbacks from Hell" and was excited to see that I had picked up a copy of one of the cited books awhile back at a book sale. I immediately started reading it while PFH was fresh in my mind. Unfortunately I did not enjoy All Heads Turn nearly as much as PFH.
Part of my distaste might stem from the writing style indicative of the time in which it was written. I typically read more contemporary horror authors (my beloved Stephen King notwithstanding). Strike one. But the book itself felt like a slog . The story dragged, I was not emotionally connected to any of the characters, and it relied heavily on many of the tropes that cause me to roll my eyes (uncivilized African cannibals, fainting white women who can't handle anything....). Again, different time, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Moreover, the ending wraps up rather quickly and I was left feeling apathetic since I wasn't invested in the story or the characters.
Just not my jam.
Part of my distaste might stem from the writing style indicative of the time in which it was written. I typically read more contemporary horror authors (my beloved Stephen King notwithstanding). Strike one. But the book itself felt like a slog . The story dragged, I was not emotionally connected to any of the characters, and it relied heavily on many of the tropes that cause me to roll my eyes (uncivilized African cannibals, fainting white women who can't handle anything....). Again, different time, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Moreover, the ending wraps up rather quickly and I was left feeling apathetic since I wasn't invested in the story or the characters.
Just not my jam.
xterminal's review
3.0
There are certain novels that are discovered early on by other novelists and talked about constantly. Some of the time, the public picks up on these and turns them, and their authors, into popular figures. Far more often, however, they are left in obscurity among the masses while achieving legendary status among the industry insiders. Anne Rivers Siddons' _The House Next Door_ is a prime example; Lee Smith's _Oral History_ is another. And there are many other examples, including this tome, which achieved something close to legendary status even before its publication-- and then disappeared, despite having the kudos of almost every major horror writer of the time thrown at it. Twenty-two years later, Farris is dimly remembered as having authored the novel that was the basis for the very bad movie _The Fury_ (1976) and nothing else. Which is something of a crime, because Farris was above average as far as seventies horror novelists went; of course, most of those have faded into (well-deserved) obscurity, as well, but a few live on. And Farris, while not on the same level as King and Koontz, is certainly no more than a shallow notch below either. And he was miles above, say, Frank de Felitta, whose every book went to #1 on the NYT chart and smashed publication records.
That being said, I've read a smattering of Farris over the years. His work is readable, if not compulsively so, and it goes quick-- if it weren't for the supernatural elements, I'd call Farris a writer of slick mysteries in the John D. MacDonald tradition. He has the same sense of pace and timing, and the same wry, understated sense of irony that, when it works, is as funny as anything ever penned by Douglas Adams. And this was right along the same lines. Not as much a travelogue-style book as many of his others-- this one is set, alternately, in the Blue Ridge Mountains (in a school obviously supposed to be VMI), in England, and on a plantation in the deep south known as Dasharoons. The action takes place in WW2, and ties together the plantation's owners, who seem to be cursed, and the son of a missionary doctor in the Congo.
Much of what happens here is, if not predictable, at least understandable to someone with an extra twenty-two years of scholarly research on various subjects under his belt. But this book came before a lot of that research, and so some of the details contained therein are astounding in their accuracy. (Farris stretches the truth now and again, but one wonders if that wasn't the going wisdom at the time on some things.) Of course, telling you what all this research went into would destroy most of the book's sense of disjunction; you kind of feel you have a sense of what's going on, but you're not really sure. (It's possible that those unfamiliar with these areas of research will be completely out of their depth.)
Because of the advances being made in anthropology and sociology, the book hasn't held up well on that level. But that's not the book's fault, and I tried to not penalize the book for what's gone on around it in the world since. Farris does a good job of capturing the deep south during WW2, everything has a rational explanations right up to the end, the characters are drawn well enough so that you start to worry about what happens to them (if not immersed, a la Walker). In general, a good, solid, easy read.
That being said, I've read a smattering of Farris over the years. His work is readable, if not compulsively so, and it goes quick-- if it weren't for the supernatural elements, I'd call Farris a writer of slick mysteries in the John D. MacDonald tradition. He has the same sense of pace and timing, and the same wry, understated sense of irony that, when it works, is as funny as anything ever penned by Douglas Adams. And this was right along the same lines. Not as much a travelogue-style book as many of his others-- this one is set, alternately, in the Blue Ridge Mountains (in a school obviously supposed to be VMI), in England, and on a plantation in the deep south known as Dasharoons. The action takes place in WW2, and ties together the plantation's owners, who seem to be cursed, and the son of a missionary doctor in the Congo.
Much of what happens here is, if not predictable, at least understandable to someone with an extra twenty-two years of scholarly research on various subjects under his belt. But this book came before a lot of that research, and so some of the details contained therein are astounding in their accuracy. (Farris stretches the truth now and again, but one wonders if that wasn't the going wisdom at the time on some things.) Of course, telling you what all this research went into would destroy most of the book's sense of disjunction; you kind of feel you have a sense of what's going on, but you're not really sure. (It's possible that those unfamiliar with these areas of research will be completely out of their depth.)
Because of the advances being made in anthropology and sociology, the book hasn't held up well on that level. But that's not the book's fault, and I tried to not penalize the book for what's gone on around it in the world since. Farris does a good job of capturing the deep south during WW2, everything has a rational explanations right up to the end, the characters are drawn well enough so that you start to worry about what happens to them (if not immersed, a la Walker). In general, a good, solid, easy read.
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