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Burning the Middle Ground
BURNING THE MIDDLE GROUND is a dark fantasy about small-town America that transforms readers' fears about the country's direction into a haunting tale of religious conspiracy and supernatural mind control. A character-driven sensibility like Stephen King's and a flair for the bizarre like Bentley Little's deliver as much appeal for dedicated fans of fantasy and horror as for mainstream readers looking for an exciting ride.
Brian McCullough comes home from school and discovers that his ten-year-old sister Fran has murderer their parents. Five year later, a journalist, Ronald Glassner, finds Brian living in the same house in the same small town of Kenning, Georgia. Planning a book on the McCullough Tragedy, Ronald stumbles into a struggle between Kenning's First Church, run by the mysterious Reverend Michael Cox, and the New Church, run by the rebellious Jeanne Harper. At the same time, Kenning's pets go berserk, and dead bodies, with the eyes and tongues removed from their heads, begin to appear.
Brian McCullough comes home from school and discovers that his ten-year-old sister Fran has murderer their parents. Five year later, a journalist, Ronald Glassner, finds Brian living in the same house in the same small town of Kenning, Georgia. Planning a book on the McCullough Tragedy, Ronald stumbles into a struggle between Kenning's First Church, run by the mysterious Reverend Michael Cox, and the New Church, run by the rebellious Jeanne Harper. At the same time, Kenning's pets go berserk, and dead bodies, with the eyes and tongues removed from their heads, begin to appear.
- GenresHorror
321 pages, Paperback
First published November 28, 2012
23 people want to read
About the author
L. Andrew Cooper
29 books30 followersL. Andrew Cooper specializes in the provocative, scary, and strange. His current project, The Middle Reaches, is a serialized epic of weird horror and dark fantasy on Amazon Kindle Vella. His latest release, Records of the Hightower Massacre, an LGBTQ+ horror novella co-authored with Maeva Wunn, imagines a near-future dystopia where anti-queer hate runs a program to "correct" deviants. Stains of Atrocity, his newest collection of stories, goes to uncomfortable psychological and visceral extremes. His latest novel, Crazy Time, combines literary horror and dark fantasy in a contemporary quest to undo what may be a divine curse. Other published works include novels Burning the Middle Ground and Descending Lines; short story collections Leaping at Thorns and Peritoneum; poetry collection The Great Sonnet Plot of Anton Tick; non-fiction Gothic Realities and Dario Argento; co-edited fiction anthologies Imagination Reimagined and Reel Dark; and the co-edited textbook Monsters. He has also written more than 30 award-winning screenplays. After studying literature and film at Harvard and Princeton, he used his Ph.D. to teach about favorite topics from coast to coast in the United States. He now focuses on writing and lives with his husband in North Hollywood, California. Find him at www.landrewcooper.com.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
March 6, 2018
I'm a lot better at reading horror than watching it. Cooper does an amazing job with making the horror he writes cinematic and has a well-paced plot with intriguing characters. I'm glad this is a book because if it had been an actual film, I might not have been tempted to watch it. Bottom line: read it if you like great stories, elements of the supernatural, and demonic churches. Come on, I know you do.
May 9, 2013
This book was on a virtual tour by L Andrew Cooper and TCM Virtual Tours! On : https://readingssunshine.wordpress.co...
Thank you so much!
First off all this eBook was provided for an honest review, and that no compensation was provided.
Brian McCullough came home after school and discovers that his parents were brutally murdered by his little sister, with only ten years. Years later, the journalist Ronald Glassner wants to write a book about the tragedy that happened to McCullough, but Ronald doesn’t know when he will get into. Finding himself with animals, who knows how, lose control and, this part I personally felt uncomfortable, because bodies began to appear viciously mutilated. Ronald sees then involved in a war between two different churches and in a big story.
I liked the characters and writing of L. AndrewCooper is very well kept and full of details that lead me to thinking “How did he came with this?” Very good!
I’m sensitive, I’m sorry but it’s true, I could not read this book before bed, it is so well detailed that the images were in my head and I could think that was even there in the action, especially in the images of Fran.
Burning the Middle Ground involves religious conspiracy and supernatural in the small town of Kenning in Georgia. I recommend it to everyone who likes horror stories and dark fantasy.
Thank you so much!
First off all this eBook was provided for an honest review, and that no compensation was provided.
Brian McCullough came home after school and discovers that his parents were brutally murdered by his little sister, with only ten years. Years later, the journalist Ronald Glassner wants to write a book about the tragedy that happened to McCullough, but Ronald doesn’t know when he will get into. Finding himself with animals, who knows how, lose control and, this part I personally felt uncomfortable, because bodies began to appear viciously mutilated. Ronald sees then involved in a war between two different churches and in a big story.
I liked the characters and writing of L. AndrewCooper is very well kept and full of details that lead me to thinking “How did he came with this?” Very good!
I’m sensitive, I’m sorry but it’s true, I could not read this book before bed, it is so well detailed that the images were in my head and I could think that was even there in the action, especially in the images of Fran.
Burning the Middle Ground involves religious conspiracy and supernatural in the small town of Kenning in Georgia. I recommend it to everyone who likes horror stories and dark fantasy.
September 3, 2022
"A character-driven sensibility like Stephen King's and a flair for the bizarre like Bentley Little's delivers."
There you have it, the single line in the cover blurb for Burning the Middle Ground that absolutely demanded I give it a read. Yes, the mention of religious conspiracy, supernatural mind control, and bodies with the eyes and tongues removed certainly caught my eye, and the overall story line sounded intriguing, but it was with the promise of a King/Little mash-up that really got me excited.
While I wouldn't go so far as to call L. Andrew Cooper the next King or Little, at least not based on his debut, I can definitely see the influences in his writing. Like King, he presents us with a largely character driven tale, set in a small town, where dialogue tells a significant piece of the story. Ronald Glassner, the opportunistic journalist, is a great character - someone with whom we can identify or relate, but with a darker, selfish (or perhaps self-serving) edge that we'd rather not admit exists within ourselves. Brian McCullough is a great sympathetic character, a young man who has experienced an unimaginable tragedy, and who simply cannot let go of the past, or his quest for answers.
The various inhabitants of Kenning, with whom we come into contact through the novel, are largely of the stock variety, but given enough personality to keep them distinct and alive in the reader's mind. As for the villains of the piece, it's hard to say much about them without getting into spoiler territory, but Jake Warren could definitely have slipped, crawled, and slithered is way out of Cooper's second source of inspiration. Everything about the man, particularly his creepy hypnotic charm, is just so well-suited to one of Little's tales.
Where I found Cooper hasn't quite nailed the technique of the masters is in his pacing. This a good book, an exciting story filled with interesting characters, but there is a lot of history and back-story that need to be imparted for it to work. King generally does back-story in snippets and flashbacks, teasing us with the significance of it all, while Little tends to lean on grandiose speeches and scenes of exposition, dropping a bomb of revelations upon us. Here, Cooper interrupts the flow of his story for an extended middle piece that shifts the focus of the story in terms of characters, plot, and feel. It's interesting enough on its own, but oddly placed, and too long for what it's intended to do.
Overall, despite the fiendishly malevolent touches of Little-inspired evil throughout the novel, this is less his brand of over-the-top horror, and more King's brand of subtle, unsettling, dread. It plays out very well, carried along, not just by the characters, but by the 'feel' of the small town. It's a very down-to-earth story, in many respects, driven by human emotion, interaction, and need. Most importantly, it's a story that raises a lot of questions as to 'how' and 'why' throughout, and which largely delivers on the answers. A great horror novel lives or dies by its resolution, and Cooper does a fine job of providing the pay-off to his tale.
Originally reviewed at Beauty in Ruins
There you have it, the single line in the cover blurb for Burning the Middle Ground that absolutely demanded I give it a read. Yes, the mention of religious conspiracy, supernatural mind control, and bodies with the eyes and tongues removed certainly caught my eye, and the overall story line sounded intriguing, but it was with the promise of a King/Little mash-up that really got me excited.
While I wouldn't go so far as to call L. Andrew Cooper the next King or Little, at least not based on his debut, I can definitely see the influences in his writing. Like King, he presents us with a largely character driven tale, set in a small town, where dialogue tells a significant piece of the story. Ronald Glassner, the opportunistic journalist, is a great character - someone with whom we can identify or relate, but with a darker, selfish (or perhaps self-serving) edge that we'd rather not admit exists within ourselves. Brian McCullough is a great sympathetic character, a young man who has experienced an unimaginable tragedy, and who simply cannot let go of the past, or his quest for answers.
The various inhabitants of Kenning, with whom we come into contact through the novel, are largely of the stock variety, but given enough personality to keep them distinct and alive in the reader's mind. As for the villains of the piece, it's hard to say much about them without getting into spoiler territory, but Jake Warren could definitely have slipped, crawled, and slithered is way out of Cooper's second source of inspiration. Everything about the man, particularly his creepy hypnotic charm, is just so well-suited to one of Little's tales.
Where I found Cooper hasn't quite nailed the technique of the masters is in his pacing. This a good book, an exciting story filled with interesting characters, but there is a lot of history and back-story that need to be imparted for it to work. King generally does back-story in snippets and flashbacks, teasing us with the significance of it all, while Little tends to lean on grandiose speeches and scenes of exposition, dropping a bomb of revelations upon us. Here, Cooper interrupts the flow of his story for an extended middle piece that shifts the focus of the story in terms of characters, plot, and feel. It's interesting enough on its own, but oddly placed, and too long for what it's intended to do.
Overall, despite the fiendishly malevolent touches of Little-inspired evil throughout the novel, this is less his brand of over-the-top horror, and more King's brand of subtle, unsettling, dread. It plays out very well, carried along, not just by the characters, but by the 'feel' of the small town. It's a very down-to-earth story, in many respects, driven by human emotion, interaction, and need. Most importantly, it's a story that raises a lot of questions as to 'how' and 'why' throughout, and which largely delivers on the answers. A great horror novel lives or dies by its resolution, and Cooper does a fine job of providing the pay-off to his tale.
Originally reviewed at Beauty in Ruins
July 2, 2017
I'm giving this book a 3 1/2. Review coming soon.
July 9, 2016
It could almost be said that I read this book by accident. Some years back a publisher offered me a stack of free e-books, and although I did not have an e-reader I thought eventually I would, so I took all of them, with no notion of what any were save one for which I had read a pre-release edition for the purpose of writing a review. That gave me an Amazon e-books library, to which a few more books were added, gifted by authors and publishers who hoped I would read them. Then a month ago I was gifted a smartphone, and soon had installed a Kindle e-reader and figured out how to access that library. Looking for some way to identify the books it contained, I clicked on one whose cover (the only information readily available through the e-reader at that time) told me noting. It downloaded that book to my phone, and so I kept it and when I finished the paperback I was reading I shifted to this.
For what it's worth, the e-reader works fairly well; I have no complaints, and it appears that they are upgrading it in ways that might make it even more useful (such as permitting bookmarks which would allow a reader to flip to a map or illustration and back to the text without a lot of effort).
The book is a horror story, and at times it is gruesome or wrenching. Cooper tries to break the mold in some ways: One of his primary villains is a Bible-thumping preacher deceived by a newcomer into becoming involved in human sacrifice to gain supernatural power by which he draws nearly the entire community into his church, still preaching something that resembles the Bible. One of the primary heroes is a woman who sets up her own Bible study and eventually her own church, but struggles against the demons behind the effort at the other church and ultimately loses herself and her life. The primary monster wins; he kills his puppet preacher. The other heroes include a boy who watched his younger sister (manipulated by the villains) killer herself after killing their parents, whose misguided act of heroism is to burn down the church and shoot people trying to escape it (also exactly what the villains wanted him to do), a gay blogger who had come to town to do a book about the boy, a gay police officer, and some frightened teenage girls.
I kept waiting for the book to get better. It just got worse.
The worse news is that I think I have more books by the same author in my stack of free books, and I will read them (although I am at this point trying to get the e-books in chronological order because some of them are apparently sequels). I did not enjoy it.
For what it's worth, the e-reader works fairly well; I have no complaints, and it appears that they are upgrading it in ways that might make it even more useful (such as permitting bookmarks which would allow a reader to flip to a map or illustration and back to the text without a lot of effort).
The book is a horror story, and at times it is gruesome or wrenching. Cooper tries to break the mold in some ways: One of his primary villains is a Bible-thumping preacher deceived by a newcomer into becoming involved in human sacrifice to gain supernatural power by which he draws nearly the entire community into his church, still preaching something that resembles the Bible. One of the primary heroes is a woman who sets up her own Bible study and eventually her own church, but struggles against the demons behind the effort at the other church and ultimately loses herself and her life. The primary monster wins; he kills his puppet preacher. The other heroes include a boy who watched his younger sister (manipulated by the villains) killer herself after killing their parents, whose misguided act of heroism is to burn down the church and shoot people trying to escape it (also exactly what the villains wanted him to do), a gay blogger who had come to town to do a book about the boy, a gay police officer, and some frightened teenage girls.
I kept waiting for the book to get better. It just got worse.
The worse news is that I think I have more books by the same author in my stack of free books, and I will read them (although I am at this point trying to get the e-books in chronological order because some of them are apparently sequels). I did not enjoy it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 20, 2014
Classic horror, set in the modern world of small-town America, L. Andrew Cooper’s Burning the Middle Ground has it all—genuine scares, shocking revelations, and characters deep enough to make you really care. The story’s told in separate parts, with a middle section revealing the gradual fall from grace of a pastor seduced by evil power. There’s a haunting satisfaction to revisiting earlier scenes and looking through fallen eyes. Well-crafted suspicion turns to something much scarier and darker. And this bleak destruction sets the scene perfectly for a wild mysterious ride as the story continues, where nothing and no-one is quite as they seemed. Bracketed by prologue and epilogue that cleverly echo each other, the story leaves readers troubled and disturbed...
Burning the Middle Ground is haunting horror, told with the understated shocks of a master’s pen, the unsettling mystery of dark fantasy, and the socially conscious presence of fascinating characters. Sin in the world’s eyes, and genuine evil, prove radically different. What the world views as good is susceptible to dark perversion. And hope might seem lost.
By the end of the tale, the story’s done, but how will the good ensure they’re on the right side? Hopefully there'll be more tales set in this world to entertain and thrill.
Disclosure: I hosted a stop on the author’s blog tour and promptly added the book to my reading list.
Burning the Middle Ground is haunting horror, told with the understated shocks of a master’s pen, the unsettling mystery of dark fantasy, and the socially conscious presence of fascinating characters. Sin in the world’s eyes, and genuine evil, prove radically different. What the world views as good is susceptible to dark perversion. And hope might seem lost.
By the end of the tale, the story’s done, but how will the good ensure they’re on the right side? Hopefully there'll be more tales set in this world to entertain and thrill.
Disclosure: I hosted a stop on the author’s blog tour and promptly added the book to my reading list.
August 24, 2014
So, what if a Harvard professor had collated all religious ceremonies into one "how-to" book that worked. What if that book fell into the hands of rampant evengelicals? Yeah, the premise hooked me too.
I do love small publishing house horror. Burning the Middle Ground is no exception. I picked up this, and another book by the author, at Gen Con, and was greatly looking forward to reading it.
The story is engaging, giving the reader a late 70's/early 80's vibe of disquiet. There are a number of great elements in the story, although a few of the characters seem stilted for a large portion of it due to the story being told out of order.
Overall? A really solid read (3*'s - I liked it), and enough to keep me enthused about the other book, which is supposed to be much darker. The author compared the two books I purchased to movie ratings, R and NC-17 (for violence). I'd rate this a pretty solid PG-13.
Most chilling about the book is not the supernatural elements (they are there and used to good effect) but the psychology of the villains. The mindset is one that is totally plausible and the aftermath of the story seems familiar to anyone who has watched cable news.
The book blazes by, I could probably have done it in a sitting but I did enjoy pacing it out over a few days reading. I think that the book is worth a look, and supporting small publishers, while sometimes risky, really pays off here.
I do love small publishing house horror. Burning the Middle Ground is no exception. I picked up this, and another book by the author, at Gen Con, and was greatly looking forward to reading it.
The story is engaging, giving the reader a late 70's/early 80's vibe of disquiet. There are a number of great elements in the story, although a few of the characters seem stilted for a large portion of it due to the story being told out of order.
Overall? A really solid read (3*'s - I liked it), and enough to keep me enthused about the other book, which is supposed to be much darker. The author compared the two books I purchased to movie ratings, R and NC-17 (for violence). I'd rate this a pretty solid PG-13.
Most chilling about the book is not the supernatural elements (they are there and used to good effect) but the psychology of the villains. The mindset is one that is totally plausible and the aftermath of the story seems familiar to anyone who has watched cable news.
The book blazes by, I could probably have done it in a sitting but I did enjoy pacing it out over a few days reading. I think that the book is worth a look, and supporting small publishers, while sometimes risky, really pays off here.
June 1, 2013
This was a solid well written horror story. It also had humor and good storytelling. I enjoyed this read though it was sluggish in the middle. The ending was solid. This was a horror book but not just gore and scary it had a solid plot and story. I look forward to reading the next book from this author.
March 28, 2013
Dark and atmospheric with great character development and and plenty to make your spine tingle. I imagine that if H.P. Lovecraft had set his works in rural Georgia, they would have been similar to Burning the Middle Ground. A great start to the series. I'm eagerly anticipating the next installment!
March 11, 2014
This book was a brilliant debut novel. Well written and with a great pace that carried you through the novel. The characters were well drawn and interesting. I am really hoping that the author writes more, as he clearly has the ability to go far.
May 6, 2013
Review to follow...
June 18, 2014
I liked it until the end. Very pessimistic. A bit overblown.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews