Chip Linton was
pilot on a plane that lost both engines when geese got sucked into them; with
no flat land close enough, he attempted a water landing a la Sully
Sullenberger’s Miracle on the Hudson. Sadly, wake from a ferry turned the
miracle into a massacre and thirty nine people died. Trying to escape Chip’s
PTSD, the family- wife Emily and twin daughters Hallie and Garnet- moves to a
small town in New Hampshire, where the new neighbors are friendly,
the women are named for herbs, and all the herb women have greenhouses like the
one on Chip’s new property.
‘The Night
Strangers’ is a truly creepy book. It was written only three years ago, but has
a strong vibe like horror from around 1970, like ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ or ‘Stepford
Wives’: isolation; never knowing if one is imagining things or really being
threatened; weird neighbors; is the horror human or paranormal? It has multiple
threads of horror woven through it: Chip is either seeing and hearing the
ghosts of Flight 1611 or his PTSD has escalated; the herb women are taking an
inordinate amount of interest in Emily and the twins and have already renamed
them with herb names; weapons around found hidden throughout the house.
Sadly, horrific
as it is, the story doesn’t quite hang together. We’ve got possible ghosts from
flight 1611, possible ghosts from the house, possible evil witches- it’s too
much and they don’t mesh well. And the characters don’t seem plausible- even
dealing with a husband with PTSD who is doing some seriously weird things most
mothers wouldn’t let the just-met neighborhood herbalists basically take over
their children anytime they aren’t in school, going so far as to rename them. I
found the ending unsatisfactory, but it is very much in the vein of ‘Rosemary’s
Baby’ or ‘Stepford’; if that is what the author was going for, he hit the nail
on the head with that touch.
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