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A review by alexandrabree
Suffer the Children by John Saul
4.0
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.