The Blackstone Chronicles: A Serial Thriller

I picked up this book becuase I had read a previous book by John Saul and loved it. This one is so fast paced, but it doesn't loose you. There are great twists and turns and the pschycology behind it is incredible. I definitely would recommend this book to someone who is looking for a good read.

I have read nearly all of John Saul's work and this pales in comparison. There was very little suspense in it, unless you read it in the originally published serial format.

This novel focuses on the town of Blackstone (New Hampshire?) and the insane asylum built there. Gifts from the old days of the asylum are finding their way into the hands of Blackstone's current populous. With each gift comes some traumatic event and a mystery swirling with it.

This is a simple work, but I guess as you read Saul's notes, it's not nearly as simple as it appears due to the serial publishing nature.

For those interested in reading something by Saul, I would recommend "Sleepwalk", "The Homing", or "The God Project" over this one.

I'm not a fan of horror fiction; it's not my genre. I read The Blackstone Chronicles as part of a project to read twenty novels, two by each of ten selected authors. Chronicles is the fourth of the twenty, and the first ever by John Saul.

By my side, as I write this, is a flyer that tells me John Saul has written 30 straight N.Y. Times bestsellers, including...his six part serial novel The Blackstone Chronicles...." So how, I wonder, could I be so audacious, brazen and insolent to rate this tale a "three..." I've gotten old, however, opinionated, and it's a three.

The writer of good horror fiction takes the incredible and weaves it into a cloak of credibility. The author's job is to make the reader believe, or at least vicariously wonder for awhile, if the absurd is possible. To accomplish this, the novelist must create characters that we identify with, and then suck us in to take possession of them in an improbable scene. We ought to cringe, sweat and fear the next sentence, yet have to read on despite our better judgment.

I'm sorry Mr. Saul; I read Chronicles in the middle of the night by a lone 75-watt bulb and not once was I afraid of going to the toilet.

I liked the town, though. At the beginning of the combined version of the six part series, in the "Dear Reader" section, Mr. Saul admits "I have been living in the fictional town of Blackstone in my head." Me too. I was raised in a small New England town. Although the place where I grew up is not quite like Blackstone, it's close enough. And from the perspective of a young boy, we had some neighbors that were as quirky and scary as the lost souls in the imaginary Blackstone are supposed to be.

Still, in the end, especially in the end, the tale didn't work for me. Perhaps the series structure is at fault. Each of the six parts deals with a "gift" that causes mayhem. So designed, the author had to deal with six improbabilities and make them credible enough to make us scared. As I recall, even Steven King will tackle only one implausibility per novel.

In the afterword, Mr. Saul mentions that he might again write about the citizens of Blackstone. If he does, I hope it's about just one book-length incredibility, and that his maniacs stay true to character.

The affluent little town of Blackstone appears to be under some kind of curse. For decades, the asylum on the hill was the town's most notable feature, and most everyone alive today either had family members who worked for it or were hospitalized in it. Now, it's being converted into mall space. That is, if it doesn't kill everyone involved in getting rid of it, first - because the town's movers and shakers are being left unique gifts, each of which brings a horrific accident or suicide along with it. And those gifts are being sent by someone at the asylum - which has stood empty for many years.

This was originally a serialized novel in six parts, and compiling the whole into one volume would better have been served by removing the necessary redundancies that format required to keep new readers up to date on the action of preceding chapters, but it's less annoying than it easily could have been. It's packaged like a supernatural horror story - and to a certain extent, it is - but it's really an epic murder mystery, spanning generations. It has some of the flavor of The Omen movies and the Friday the 13th T.V. series, with its "cursed objects" and portentous sins-of-the-father dooms visited on the sons, but these are more the bouquet of the wine than the vintage itself. Jaded readers will figure out the mystery well before the final revelation, but it's still cleverly done and a worthy read.

After Saul's first novel twenty-five years ago, Suffer the Children, I vowed I'd never read him again - that book was an endless parade of sadisms against children, with no socially redeeming value that I could discern - but happily a friend prevailed upon me to undertake The Blackstone Chronicles, which largely redeems the author in my eyes. It has some grisly moments, yes - it is a horror story, after all - but at least any nastiness in its pages has a rhyme and reason behind it, and even a sick kind of poetry.

I thought I was going to be in for a great novel, but it turned out that it was just an average book. Although I was extremely happy to see the resurrection of some of Sauls old characters (Elizabeth from Suffer the Children, Melissa and Charles Holloway from Second Child) I was disappointed with the writing. It was not as exciting as I first thought it to be. It didn't really hold me and the ending was predictable. However, as I said before, I loved the idea of Saul putting in old characters and hope that he does this again.