The Burning

Jeff Fain

Leisure Books emerged in the early eighties, at the dawning of the last golden age of horror, as one of the premier publishers of horror fiction. Unfortunately, this early title from Leisure was not at all a harbinger of their bright future.

"Dan enjoyed what he did. Tremendously! It gave him the freedom to do whatever he chose, seeing and doing what some men only dreamed about. It enabled hom to make the move from a hustling city like New York toa quiet little place like Kinston, North Carolina-- a move for the better, despite what his publisher, John McVey had said." (p. 34)

Once you have recovered from the trauma of reading that paragraph, we'll continue.

The grammatical horror presented there (in a paragraph chosen at random) as augmented by Fain's propensity for italicizing words seemingly at random:

"Tommy was after her constantly to exercise and try to keep some semblance of her former figure, but she just lost interest in herself. She probably figured that since she had already got her man, there was no longer a need to do anything but sit around, watch the soaps on television, eat Hershey Bars and drink Mountain Dews." (p. 57) (For those of you not reading in HTML-- since Amazon refuses to let us put italics in Amazon reviews-- "got her man," "Hershey bars," and "Mountain Dews" are italicized in that section.)

The structural idiocy of this book might possibly be overlooked, or at least pushed to the back burner, with a sufficiently intriguing plot, exceptionally well-drawn characters, or a well-thought-out mystery (or, of course, any combination of the above). We get none of these things. The book is painfully predictable, and this is heightened by the first scene, which supposedly takes place ten years after the events in the rest of the book (though even that is called into question by the book's epilogue, which seems to place the frame the day after the events in the final chapter). All this, unfortunately, represents the publisher very badly; assuming an editor hadn't rejected the manuscript out of hand, that editor should have required extensive revision before publishing this monstrosity. Were I not already quite familiar with some of the wonderful stuff Leisure has put out over the years (for example, six of William Schoell's eight brilliant eighties horror novels, and their recent championing of such horror lights as Richard Laymon, Edward Lee, Simon Clark, and Charlee Jacob), I'd likely be scared off from ever reading another Leisure title. Thankfully, I discovered the great Schoell first, back when Leisure first released Spawn of Hell back in '83. I can only recommend that readers, even the most hardcore supernatural-horror fanatics, avoid this title like the plague. I'm giving it half a star because I finished it, but I wonder if it even deserves that.