CHASING THE DEAD by Joe Schreiber (Ballantine Books, September 2006) ISBN # 03548748 / 9780345484476.
Summary from the Goodreads website . . . . .
“You have a very lovely little girl,” breathed the voice on the phone. And just like that, Susan Young is drawn into a living nightmare.
A stranger has kidnapped Sue’s daughter, Veda. But he doesn’t want her money, only her suffering–and he will kill Veda if Sue doesn’t follow his every command. With detailed instructions, the faceless abductor leads Sue into a blinding snowstorm on the longest night of the year, to a place she has not traveled to since childhood. The voice on the other end of the line somehow knows Sue’s deepest, most chilling secret–an ominous incident from her past, buried long ago…
Across the loneliest back roads of Massachusetts, in the black expanse of a New England winter, Sue is forced to confront her most awful fears as she is met at each step by ever increasing horrors created by a monster who is surely something less than human. In the hope of saving her daughter from a kidnapper whose origin seems darker than anything she could ever have imagined, Sue will discover just how much trauma and fright the human body is capable of absorbing.
Set over the course of a single night, Chasing the Dead is a fast-paced, ferociously tense supernatural thriller. With the skill of masters like Dean Koontz and David Morrell, Joe Schreiber has created a tableau of shock and horror, death and destruction, that will draw you in and never let you go.
My review on the Goodreads website . . . . .
This was my first encounter with the writing of Joe Schreiber, and based on this book there will be more.
I was looking for a different book (Kill Creek by Thomas Scott) while visiting the Zionsville, Indiana public library - - which they didn't have on the shelves. On the same section of shelving, the title Chasing The Dead caught my eye. I picked it up, scanned the summary on the inner flap, and decided to give it a go. So glad that I did. I devoured this book in less than two days.
The novel speeds forward at a relentless pace, covering the events of a single long night in wintry Massachusetts along the backroads from small town to small town.
If this had only been about a demented serial killer with a penchant for forcing the parents of his young and innocent victims on a scavenger hunt of sorts it would have been creepy enough. But Schreiber does more than that by including the creation of a centuries-old Puritanical child-killer whose influence and power extends into the present, a very creepy invention and something that separates this novel from the similarity of rest of the pack of like-minded stories.
You won't be disappointed, and the eerie apprehensive feeling won't stop you from shivering until you reach the final pages. Recommended.
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