Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Release Date: October 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0312357498
A dark fiction novel able to keep the reader immersed in the story. A unique and compelling plot I was unable to put down until I’d read it in its entirety. It really is that good.
Robin Stone is pretty much invisible to her fellow students at the prestigious and historically rich Baird College. She’s not hideously deformed or socially inept. She isn’t rallying against the world, nor does she have lofty self perceptions that she’s better than everyone else. She’s from a broken family whose mother is a woman on the edge of insanity, and whose father gave up on them years ago, but out of guilt, paid for his first born to gain a first class education.
Robin took the Get Out Of Jail Free card as a chance to escape her old life, but now she knows she can’t. She’s not the same as all the high class rich kids who attend Baird. She has swapped one life of misery for another. It may be not be the mental anguish of home, but utter loneliness brings its own problems. All of this is conveyed up front, not in huge chunks of information dumping, but slipped into the dark images Sokoloff conveys and in the way the protagonist moves through the fellow student body. It sets a dark atmosphere for the book from page one.
Thanks Giving holiday is coming this weekend, and all the students will be going home for the four day break. Everyone, except Robin. The solitude becomes depressing, closing in on her, magnifying her fears until one single thought becomes crystal clear: she can’t take her existence anymore. Death’s embrace would be welcome.
Not wanting her sorority cast-off of a roommate to be the one to find her, she procures pills and alcohol and heads to the large central meeting place so a stranger can find her earthly remains. It is there, with the means of her destruction in the palm of her hand, that she discovers she isn’t the only one who didn’t go home. She isn’t the only misfit at Baird.
Including Robin, five students have stayed at Baird College for the long weekend. Five young lives that become inexplicably linked through terror, because something ancient has been summoned. An older than creation evil, bent on destruction and cruelty, which has been innocently unleashed on Robin and her new companions.
Nominated for the Horror Writers Association's Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel after being released late in 2007, this tale of an ancient evil is deliciously dark, extremely well thought out, and beautifully written in a simple prose that makes it a delight to read.
From the first page the reader swims into the deeply depressing life that is Robin Stone. We spend much of the first part of the book immersed in her sorrow and in the setting of Baird College. Introduction of the other four members of this cast is brilliantly done through excellent use of character interaction. Descriptions and comparisons carry the theme of five lives spiralling into oblivion in vivid detail and include very real and delicate nuances. Alexandra allows us to care for each character; to understand their flaws and a very real need for all of them to be understood by another. The reader is allowed to urge them onto finding their successes and becomes just as disappointed as the characters when another artful spanner is thrown into the mix. Like a rollercoaster ride without a harness, the journey is both terrifying and exhilarating.
Tension builds through a number of minor climaxes and false plateaus of calm to a thrilling and extremely satisfying conclusion. I was riveted. This book is a real page turner I enjoyed immensely. This is a first class horror novel I recommend whole-heartedly.
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