Hell's Shadows

by Dean Klein

Remember the classic and lovely film, Poltergeist? About a house built on a graveyard? Good, wasn’t it? For its day. Now here comes a haunted house that’s ten times worse.

Poltergeist’s spirits simply floated down the stairs, seemingly oblivious to the human family around them. In this work entitled, Hell’s Shadows, the spirits aren’t quite so passive. Indeed, they are predators. Zombie ghosts. But as bad as they are, there is something else lurking in the background, something far more terrible.

Hell's Shadows (one of three high-concept works of eerie fiction by this author) is a wild story of the most haunted house of all time, a house so dangerous that nearly an entire police force is wiped out by the creatures within it. And even that is not the worst of it. An utterly entertaining, immensely spooky and distinctly complex tale, Hell's Shadows takes the genre to an entirely new level of sophistication. And though set in modern time, the evil in motion today began almost two centuries ago.

It is the winter of 1830. The townspeople of Carson Creek, North Carolina, have had enough. They dismiss a despised parson from his post, telling him to leave for good. In response, Abner Bookins curses the town from his pulpit, telling them to expect retribution for their blasphemous act. The people jeer the empty threat. A week later, something unimaginable happens. The town’s loss is so great that even after the passage of one hundred eighty years, third and fourth generation residents rarely speak of it and only in whispers…many of them frightened, believing what happened so long ago could happen again.

Transferred to Carson Creek to oversee plant operations for his employer, Gil Turner and his wife, Robin, are house-hunting. As they head back to the real estate agent’s office, Robin faints as the car passes by an old house on a street known as Parson’s Knoll. Upon recovering, she strangely insists on seeing it no matter that its condition is deplorable. The realtor tells Robin to forget it, that the house has a horrible history. And then she adds that it isn’t really empty, that it only looks that way. Scoffing at the claims, Robin tells her shocked husband she wants the house. Reluctantly giving in to his wife, the purchase is concluded with restoration commencing soon afterwards. But only days after moving in, the couple learns to their terrible distress the realtor was right…they’re not alone. They also discover the house is alive, able to change its structure, twice trying to kill Robin. There are inexplicable sounds, sightings and stains. Stairs move on their own. A spectral wraith floats over the grounds at night. Pulsating shadows inhabit the attic…and they have teeth. Yet no one knows what they are. An unnatural wind rises up out of nowhere to blow over the house, yet is felt nowhere else in town, not even one foot off the property line. Vampiric trees cut down during the restoration are found to have blood sap. It is then the curse of the long-dead parson returns in fury. The astonished police are helpless to stop it. The town panics, and Robin and Gil caught right in the middle.

But even with all that is happening, things become direr for the Turners. What else is in this house, something unknown lurking within Parsons Knoll, is the worst danger of all. And it has a claim on Robin.

Nook

First published November 16, 2012

About the author

Dean Klein is a former technical marketing director once responsible for the research and development of new business for operating companies as well as for corporate clients of Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA. The product markets in which he worked included specialty chemicals and materials, coatings, metals and minerals, among many others. Spending his boyhood in Atlanta and later, Westfield, New Jersey, Mr. Klein attended college where he earned degrees in chemistry, biology and marketing. Personal interests include writing (of course!), baseball, vintage British cars, visiting the South Seas, collecting exotic plants and wire hair fox terriers.

Reviews

[Kagama-the Literaturevixen]

I cant believe this is for real
https://www.scifiandscary.com/this-is...

[Skye Kilaen]

This author's behavior is beyond the pale - and judging by the review and also just reading the overly long blurb, I can't imagine the book is any good. Details: https://www.scifiandscary.com/this-is...

[Jen W.]

(Not rating, because I didn't read it.)

This guy sounds fun.

https://www.scifiandscary.com/this-is...

Welcome to my "never read" list.

[Kara]

Very few people lack self awareness this badly. Dean Klein needs a wake-up call. Not everyone is going to like you or your work, and you should NOT be an author if you can't take criticism.

I hope the rest of his author career (what remains after this fiasco) flops and flops HARD.



And as someone that has been diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, this is embarrassing. Don't use your illness as a crutch. If you're going to melt down over someone not liking something you did, DON'T SUBMIT IT. It's not up to them to cater to your illness. And they were perfectly nice to you. That does not give you the right to abuse them. Like, yikes.

Also, so this doesn't get deleted: I read the sample, and I was intrigued enough to want to continue. Yeah, the writing is heavy handed and it starts out with a monstrous info dump, but the mystery of that guy's wife fainting on a former murder site had me wanting to know what went on there. Unfortunately because of this author's behavior, I'll never find out.

[Marc · Rating 1 out of 5]

Overwritten and just not a pleasant read. I plowed through one-hundred pages but just did NOT enjoy. I couldn't relate to the characters at all. I should have read the synopsis more closely; that alone would have dissuaded me from reading it. I don't care for anything that tells me what I'll feel when I read something.

Taste is subjective. Other people might enjoy this. I certainly didn't.

[Clay · Rating 1 out of 5]

Imagine for a moment that the author's preface to Stephen King's PET SEMATARY went something like this:

Think you've read every book there is about cemeteries? WELL YOU HAVEN'T! I once saw a movie, or maybe I read an EC Comic, I don't remember, that was about a creepy cemetery, but what I did in THIS book is make all the characters and everything EVEN SCARIER, and guess what: there's a pet cemetery in this book where when you bury dead people or pets in them but mostly people because that's the twist -- THEY COME BACK TO LIFE! But when they come back to life they're weird and evil and gross, TWIST AGAIN! So spoilers, I guess. Kind of weird that I'm telling you all the secrets in the opening pitch but whatever. Also: I was an English teacher so you know all this writing is amazing, I'm the best, believe it BECAUSE I SAID SO.

Would you continue reading that book?

Before stumbling upon Mr. Klein, I have never in my life encountered an author with a tinnier ear for the most basic elements of writing: voice, point-of-view, pacing, characterization, dialogue, and most importantly, SHOWING, not telling. Let's start there. Absolutely everything Mr. Klein does is Tell, not Show; even his dialogue attribution -- the worst sins of which are usually just lazy adverbs (he said smugly) -- races to TELL you what he meant, rather than simply letting the dialogue itself show us the way. Take this absolutely mind-bogglingly awful sentence:

"This is as far as I go," were the words of someone flatly disinterested in getting any closer to the property than this.

That's right, Dear Reader. Mr. Klein is so chronically unable to Show that he will inexplicably Tell his reader what the preceding dialogue is meant to convey. Forget context, mood, characterization, clever dialogue, or even internal monologue; just flat-out TELL the reader what you meant. And this happens in almost every paragraph, on every page, over and over again.

Just for fun, here are some of my absolute favorite snippets from a writer with a 4.0 GPA and numerous writing awards under his belt:

Now, nothing save his own death would ever diminish the effects of having suffered so many frightening all the way to grisly experiences while living in that horrid place.

Gil and Elaine were simultaneously frightened by what was a completely unexpected and possibly major medical emergency.

Vivid mental imprints of the eerie to terrifying events thrust upon them from the moment he and Robin set foot on that property still raged inside Gil.

Given the condition of the old crumbling house as they would soon see, there was little reason for anyone to consider that place as their home even if it didn't come with all the stories that ranged from disturbing to gruesome.

Sounds like sort of a shit place to live, doesn't it? Completely ramshackle, with hundreds of years of bad mojo attached to it, and the very first time you drive past it, your wife has a Grand-Mal seizure and is nearly killed because Psychic House Attack. FUCK IT, LET'S BUY THIS HOUSE AND MOVE IN! This may be the world's first haunted house story where the audience doesn't even have to yell "Get out!" at the first sign of the haunting; the house itself is yelling that at this couple from page one (hell, from the author's note before the book even begins!) and yet they purchase it anyway. By page three I was solidly rooting for the house.

Mr. Klein's nine-page email in defense of his skills is made incandescently farcical with even a side-eyed glance at any single page of HELL'S SHADOWS. There is no narrative cohesion here whatsoever: one moment you're meant to think Gil is the novel's third-person limited narrator, as we begin inside Gil's head, share his memories and reflections, and are left to marvel at the author's choice of telling us in the first few pages that an evil house killed Gil's wife (spoilers!); but then a page or two later, we're in a third-person omniscient POV that knows things Gil does not or could not know ("Robin never knew her fainting spell occurred at the exact moment of Julianna's death." Oh. Who are you again? Who's telling this story? What's happening?).

Horror stories are almost always best when told from a well-managed set of POVs, each carefully controlled to mete out the plot's surprises in character-driven ways. Dan Simmons managed his cast of characters masterfully in the horror epic CARRION COMFORT by weaving the story in and out of their POVs with a deftness that feels organic, and when the terrors come in that book -- and they are relentless, often unbearable terrors -- we as readers feel them all the more deeply because we know and love the characters. Mr. Klein expects me to care about Gil because he says so: he's intelligent and possessed of a "can-do attitude" with a "very responsible job"; he's average looking, "very blond", affable, sharp, popular, and good at his job, until he's not, because his wife died, I guess? I'm still not sure, because Mr. Klein gives us all of two whopping paragraphs on Gil's backstory and character before slipping in that his wife died, a blow from which he apparently cannot recover. Gil is, of course, ruminating over these losses with a glass of scotch (sic), but after two miserable sips he pours the remainder of his glass back into the bottle; we aren't even given the comfort of an understandable bender as a means of connecting with Gil.

Mr. Klein goes to great lengths -- both in his desperate self-defensive email and in the book's insufferably self-aggrandizing promotional material -- to tell all of us dumdum readers that we've never experienced such sophisticated originality before (even as he readily admits that the book owes its origins to Stephen Spielberg's POLTERGEIST), and promises a "hugely out-of-the-box storyline". And yet the seasoned reader of horror will immediately start picking out the most exhausted of tropes: the protagonist with the mysterious extrasensory perception (good lord, need I even list any?); the haunted house with a mind and life of its own (throw a stick at any Horror section in any bookstore and you'll hit two dozen of these); the Ancient Evil Long Thought Dormant (zzzzzzzz); the Charming Small Town Hiding A Secret But What Could Possibly Go Wro--OH NO A DEMON!; and on and on and on. Even the name of the evil house is a direct crib from a Stephen King story: Parsons Knoll (sic, again; where, oh where, is the possessive apostrophe, Mr. Klein?) sounds awfully close to Preacher's Corners, a King creation that just happens to contain a pure and manifest evil with roots in the mid-1800s. COINKYDINK!

I'm sorely tempted to pay my ten bucks, cash on the nightmarish barrelhead of Mr. Klein's bucket full of narcissistic delusions, and push myself grimly, Bataan-style, through the entire thing. I must admit to some curiosity as to how a story could possibly become interesting when I already know the fate of its protagonist at the hands of so obviously evil a house. When you're told in the author's preface what happens and why, there had better be SOMETHING in the story itself worth paying for, right? But on the other hand, life is far too short to waste on bad books. Any single page of the aforementioned CARRION COMFORT brings more pathos, wonder, dread, awe, and character with it than a thousand HELL'S SHADOWS could manage.

But still...

[Sarah Weeks]

Relies on comparisons to Stephen King to sell novels. Can't even stand on his own. This book could have cut about 200 pages and been much better. Not worth your time.

[Rachel]

As my original thoughts were removed, I am just going to share what GoodReads said to me about condemning author behavior.

Hi Rachel,

We're reaching out because your review of Hell's Shadows was recently brought to our attention. It may be helpful to clarify that while negative or harsh opinions are allowed on Goodreads, we do not allow reviews that primarily focus on an author's behavior rather than the content of the book, even if it's done in a thoughtful, considered way. As we determined that your review violated our Review Guidelines, we have removed it from the site. We have included a copy of the review at the end of this email for your personal records. Please note that you are welcome to post another review of the book as long as it falls within our rules.

We can also understand your frustration about this author's comments online, and we want to assure you that we strictly prohibit authors from harassing or calling out reviewers on Goodreads for posting negative opinions. We expect all authors on Goodreads to abide by our Author Guidelines, and we take action when we see that authors have violated our rules on Goodreads.

If you are concerned about the behavior of an author or another member, please flag the content using the desktop site or report the issue to us so we can look into the situation. We ask that you please refrain from posting reviews like this in the future.

Sincerely,
The Goodreads Team

[Sarah - All The Book Blog Names Are Taken · Rating 1 out of 5]

EDIT: I checked out the preview on Amazon because I couldn't resist. There is nothing in those first few pages that would interest me in continuing. So heavy-handed, one must think surely, this must be a joke, right? I don't even know quite how to describe it, but the author takes every opportunity to use seventeen words, when ten would do - and be more effective, to boot. HARD PASS, also taking into consideration the Master Class that the author is putting on in showing what NOT to do in regards to interacting with reviewers.

++++++++++

I won't rate it, but the behavior of this author is absolutely deplorable.

[Patrick Sparky]

Your book sucks.

[Lulu · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a mediocre book by a mediocre author. The storylines are simplistic, and drag on for too far long. It blatantly steals from multiple different literary works, and is clearly written by an underqualified, and inexperienced author.

[Lealie Mae · Rating 1 out of 5]

mediocre in the worst way

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

great book incredibly scary in places well worth reading and well written

[Katie(babs)]

NOPE TO THE NOPE:

https://www.scifiandscary.com/this-is...

[Mónica BQ]

Nope