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Evil Teens and Eyes in the Night

Author: John Saul

MaryAnne Carpenter is escaping a bad marriage. The out, however, has been attained by loss and horror. Her best friends, the Wilkensons, were both killed on their ranch. The father was killed by a good horse that suddenly went crazy and trampled him. The mother fell or was pushed off a cliff. They left behind enormous wealth and their sulky, adolescent son, Joey. MaryAnne takes her own children, leaves her abusive husband, and flees to the ranch to do her duty and take care of Joey. What she finds instead is secrecy, a cloying sense that all is not right, and malevolent eyes tracking her in the night.

John Saul is known for his “horror children.” His slow-burn (or, simply slow, as the case may be) stories always focus on abused children, many of whom slowly turn monstrous, either from circumstance or supernatural inclination. The Guardian is no exception, and we know from the start that the broody Joey will be both catalyst and monster – eventually. Is Joey the thing in the night that killed his parents, or is the thing in the night merely an entity that is drawn to the budding monstrous nature of this boy, or both? Who’s to say – and it certainly is going to be a painfully long time before you find out or get more than two repetitive sentences out of Joey.

No one in The Guardian is especially likable. MaryAnne, through the first few chapters, builds a bit more of a rapport with readers. The sadness of her failing marriage and the way that her husband pits

Image by Steve from Pixabay

her own children against her demands a certain level of empathy, but we really learn nothing of her beyond the fact that she is starting to escape from a bad marriage and that she misses and loves her friends. She is the typical goody-two-shoes, interested only in helping Joey and not caring about her sudden access to vast wealth. But, she’s also instantly suspicious of the boy and the rumors because  . . . suspense . . . intrigue . . . . questions. Right?

Yawn. And that’s the entire book. A lot of waiting. A lot of hinting. A lot of things half said. A lot of Joey pouting in his bedroom wondering what is wrong with him but telling us nothing. A lot of people being moody and morbid and small-town secretive (except for that one shotgun toting neighbor who reveals just enough to – gasp – make our protagonist wary but incapable of mounting a defense.)

Eventually, good-hearted-neighbor-with-a-big-mouth reveals enough that MaryAnne can suddenly, shockingly, just guess the entire puzzle based on nothing, and then we get into a very rapid, very messy ending. We get some unexpected deaths, of children of course, because it’s John Saul. And we get a random government conspiracy and a sci-fi like bent thrown in out of nowhere, and some “but that wasn’t the end” bad vibes. When we’re not yawning, we’re noticing the holes in the plot, the sudden unpleasant rapidity after hundreds of pages of nothing, and the entire fact that despite the big “reveal” we really, really just don’t care.

I’m not sure why John Saul is so attractive to so many readers. This is my second of his books (the first was the more acclaimed Suffer the Children), and I find them all dark and broody and slow with no one to like or even find interesting and a lot of out-of-the-blue, overblown reveals. It’s like a horror soap opera, with about the same production quality and characterization. Not recommended.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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