Could have been much better.

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	• Dark Hollow Brian Keene Leisure Books, 2008 - 305 pages average customer review:based on 30 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Dark Hollow by Brian Keene

A fun read. A very well paced and entertaining story. An interesting take on the Satyr myth.

Loved it!

I found The Conquerer Worms disappointing so it took me a while to pick up Dark Hollow by Brian Keene. And once again I'm disappointed, but this time it's because I put it off reading this book for so long.

Dark Hollow is the tale of a small town in Pennsylvania, once a farming community, now home to Adam, a midlist mystery writer, his wife and their dog. But their town is also home to something else, an other-worldly creature, summoned long ago and finally awakened again with the first day of spring.

Dark Hollow is a very compelling tale. Sure there's a monster in woods, and some creepy carnivorous demon trees, but the real horror is in the effect the events of the story have on the characters, particularly Adam and his wife. Keene is able to drive a man's loyalty into very dangerous places, pitting his own nature against his ideals. The conflict made Dark Hollow hard to put down and held up through the very last line.

It's easily my favorite Keene work so far. While it counts as horror, there's less gore and violence and far more dread and conflict, which is exactly why Keene seems ready to cross the line into a position rare for a horror author-mainstream acceptance.

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Could have been much better.

In Dark Hollow, an author named Adam Senft (which, while I'm sure is a perfectly good name wherever Mr. Keene is from, sounds like a sneeze and was a bit distracting) has marital problems and a dog. A satyr invades the woods near his house and throws the town into upheaval.

I've oversimplified the plot, of course, to keep from spoiling anything. All of that you get in the first chapter, and it unfolds from there.

I enjoyed the plot. The scenes were perfectly serviceable for the story (while not terribly outstanding), and the ending ties in very well to the core of the story. It was one of the high points for me. Endings can be tough to make satisfying (Dean Koontz comes to mind, he has some awful endings), so this made the read almost worth it.

Well, I enjoyed the plot, I liked the ending, and I thought the story worked from beginning to end. So why only three stars? (I was going to give it 2 stars, but the last couple of paragraphs bumped up my rating a star, that's how good the ending is.)

My problem with the book is, quite simply, the writing. This is Mr. Keene's fourth (or fifth) book. I have not read any others so I don't know if this is just his style, but I suspect it is not. (I have read other reviews on here, and they seem to reflect that.) But after five books, there is really no excuse for the lack of characterization, the sophomoric descriptions (especially from a character who is supposed to be a writer), and the stilted and (sometimes) silly dialogue. The characters felt manipulated, not by the situation in the book, but by the needs of the author: i.e. This character needs to be standing there so the other character can make a certain remark, OK, he walks there for no reason. (That is a simplistic example that may or may not reflect an actual occurrence in the book, but that was the 'feeling' I got from the text.) I guess I'm saying it felt forced, not natural or organic.

This is not a bad story, just a bad example of writing. When literary snobs point to the lack of talent in this genre, if they point to it at all, this book would do nothing to change their minds, and that is my main problem with it. To be fair, I read a lot of books and there are many that are well written but the stories are awful. I'd rather read a "Dark Hollow"-esq book instead of each of those bad stories.

I can't recommend this book to anyone looking for "thoughtful" horror or dark fantasy, but I would to a casual reader who just wants to shut off for however long it takes them to read this. (It took me 2 days of intermittent reading.)

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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