Night Relics – James P. Blaylock

Ace, copyright 2004, 311 pages

ISBN: 0-441-00022-3

Read: June 2012, at age 34

This is a bit of a departure from my normal reading habits.  In fact, I’m not really sure why it was on my bookshelf.  I think maybe someone gave it to me for a birthday present back when I was still in high school.  Anyway, I finally read it.

It’s a standalone supernatural horror novel.  Basically, man lives in haunted house, and strange things happen around him.

From the dust jacket:

In this brilliant and haunting new novel, James P. Blalock turns his unique imaginative talents to a classic form – the ghost story – and creates a chilling tale of unusual emotional power.  It is a story of the ghosts that haunt us all.  Ghosts of the human heart, real and imagined, lost memories that whisper on the wind…

Peter…

The voice echoed in the California night, a soulful cry that seemed to call out to Peter Travers, and to him alone.  He had begun a new life, with a new lover.  But the eerie voice triggered memories of his failed marriage and his love for his son.  Was the voice real?  An imagined voice from his own past?  Or a warning from beyond?

Peter…

At first, he dismissed his fears.  Then his wife and son vanished without a trace.  And his frantic search for them was haunted by mysterious fleeting visions of a woman and child.

Peter…

Night after night, he seemed to drift further from reality – and closer to a terrible truth.  A secret that refused to die…

And there are a couple of promotional blurbs.  I maybe should have been warned off by the first line of the promo copy.

My reactions – Spoilers aplenty!

One good thing:  The setting was suitably spooky and well described.

One bad thing:  Our main viewpoint character was terribly passive, and pretty much wandered around, got possessed, and got bailed out by his girlfriend.

Overall:

I didn’t much like the book.  It was populated by creeps, who were occasionally viewpoint characters.  Nobody really knew what was going on, and so they pretty much just reacted badly.  The proactive characters were the ones that you wanted to lose, and one person only started fighting back with just a few pages to go, and then everything magically resolved.

The writing was decent, and the setting was wonderful.  The characters had potential, but their interaction with each other and the plot was dreadful.

Rating: 2

Characters:

There were four main viewpoint characters, and I think there were a couple more thrown in here and there.  The main four were:

• Peter – he felt like the hero, but never really did anything other than get possessed a couple of times.
• Beth – Peter’s girlfriend.  She seems to be just along for the ride until right at the end.
• Pomeroy – A real dirtbag – he’s stalking Beth, and trying to extort business partners, and generally being every bit as horrible as he can be, for perfectly delusional reasons, and no redeeming characteristics.  That said, I’m still confused as to exactly why he met the fate that he did.
• Klein – Pomeroy’s business partner, and generally unscrupulous business man with a few redeeming characteristics.

The characters felt real enough, behaved ok, and, other than Pomeroy, felt like they were reasonable people.  However, I couldn’t really be bothered to care much about them, and that’s where the horror fell flat.

Setting:

Rural California – well-conceived and described.  Lots of effort went into non-visual descriptions, and they worked well.

Plot:

Strange things happen.  Our hero gets possessed a couple of times, and we try to figure out who the ghost is.  Except we’re told pretty early on.  The plot just didn’t work for me.  There was potential early, but when we got into the meat of the story, it just… nobody ever figured out what exactly was going on, and eventually someone did the right random thing, and life magically went back to normal.

Readability:

Very readable - the language was perfectly serviceable, and the reading wasn’t unduly hard.  The story just wasn’t that interesting.

Other Opinions:

Not much out there, other than a few Goodreads and Amazon reviews.  I found this old Kirkus review, but it’s pretty incomplete.   The general feel isn’t positive.